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Quick prototype demo for possible Sinden light gun improvement

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greymatr:
Hi,

I just wanted to give a quick demo of an idea I had using a Playstation 4 Camera and a pair of 3d glasses for a TV.

The PS4 Camera has two camera built into it and the glasses are placed on one of the cameras. Because of the polarization filter in the LCD panel of the 3d glasses it can be aligned so that the light coming from a monitor is blocked.

This makes the monitor appear like it is off and is just black. The other camera can see the light coming from the monitor and software should be able to make a quite quick difference between the two.

My idea is that this would allow for a Sinden style gun but without the need for the white border.

Thanks for listening to my TED talk ;)

RandyT:
What good is a video feed from a dead monitor?  Unless I'm missing something, it's no different than not having that camera active at all.

The reason it blocks with the polarizer is because it is oriented 90-degrees to the internal one in the LCD panel.  For this to do anything, you would need a special LCD panel with different polarization on the border from the rest of the screen.  And then you would still only need one camera to use it.

And since your eyes aren't polarized, you would still see the border.

TapeWormInYourGut:
It's hard to tell what he means, but I can guess.

You have 2 images that are exactly the same except for one specific rectangular area in each image. You can compare the differences to find the display's outline. For example, take all the pixels of the first image that are black. Next, take the pixels from the second image that are white. The display's area would be all pixels that are both black on the first image, and white on the second image.

Another way is to compare pixels and remove all colors that are within a given tolerance range. Theoretically a rectangular object will remain since they're polar opposites.

I think a big problem is that this will be very slow.

RandyT:
I don't think that approach solves anything, even if it worked, which it wouldn't because it relies on border areas being non-black in color.

Honestly, there is no way to make the border visible to the camera, and not to the user, unless the border is polarized in a direction favorable to the one on the camera, and the player is wearing glasses with polarizers which block it.

This is the reason so many lightgun systems are based on IR light.  IR is in the part of the spectrum to which the camera is very sensitive, but also happens to be the part to which our eyes are very insensitive (almost completely.)  There is very little difference in the Sinden method, as opposed to lining the perimeter of the screen with IR LEDs, or even just beacons at the corners.  The LEDs have the advantage of not being visible to the player but have the disadvantage of requiring more math and/or fairly good precision in mounting.  Outlining the screen area directly on the display provides a better edge reference and no extra hardware, but at the cost of having it be constantly visible to the player.

There are probably some additional pros and cons in there somewhere, but that's the basic gist of it.
 

TapeWormInYourGut:
The player doesn't wear any glasses... He's saying that you have 2 cameras mounted in your gun. One will have the polarization filter, and the other won't. The software can identify the area of the display using those 2 images in his example. Once we have the area of the display, a border can be calculated to perform something like Sinden, or instead, the midpoints of edges can be found to do something like GUN4IR. The border doesn't actually get rendered. It doesn't need to because the software calculates it using those 2 images.

The problem is that processing the 2 images would be slow. Or at least too slow for a gun game.

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