Nick Darnell

2 minute read

Our PMD CamCube 3.0 arrived over at Activate3D a few days ago, figured I would snap a picture of this bad boy.  This thing is one seriously beefy time of flight depth camera, note the size of it compared to the coke can.

The cameras shell is all metal.  The two screens on either side contain a matrix of infrared lights that emit light at some interval to determine the depth of objects the camera can see. It does this based on how long the light takes to return to the camera, hence the name ‘time of flight’.

Which is different from ‘structured light’ cameras, like the PrimeSense camera.  Which is what Microsoft’s Kinect is based on. It works by emitting a constant pattern of infrared light and the camera interprets distortions in the pattern to determine an objects depth in the scene.

I’ve gotten a chance to play with the CamCube some and this thing is definitely a quality piece of technology.  The depth data I’ve seen most cameras return is usually really noisy.  But the depth data I’ve seen this thing return is really solid, especially on the outline / edges of objects.  Noise around the edges of objects tends to cause lots of problems for skeleton tracking systems because it causes lots of small changes in the bones estimated location inside the sectioned body part from frame to frame, resulting in a twitchy skeleton that has to be filtered.

Anyway, it’s a pretty sweet beefy piece of tech that I thought I might share.

Oh, also, it showed up in an all metal case.  Awesome.