Re: web camera in combination with a projector to control the mouse coursor using a laser pointer

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On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 15:31:55 -0600, The March Hare [MVP] wrote:

> On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 14:05:30 +0400, aa wrote:
>
>> I want to use a USB web camera in combination with a projector to control
>> the mouse coursor using a laser pointer.
>>
>> The projector projet computer screen on a Big Screen. The web-camera looks
>> at the Big Screen and see the laser dot on the BigScreen and determine their
>> coordinates.
>>
>> The camera driver (or additional software) moves the mouse cursor to the
>> co-ordinate of the laser dot and emulated a mouse click.
>
> Why not just use a hand-held mouse such as those made by Gyration?
>
> The resolution of most web cams maxes out at 640x480 and it's unlikely that
> you could even get that kind of precision using a web cam. Is that precise
> enough for your project?
>

I echo what March says. Though I suppose you may have other reasons for
wanting to track the mouse. Even so I would be tempted to use a moise
pointer with a hardware splitter rather than trying to write the code. Or
to capture the mouse in the target PC and send the coordinate stream on by
IP or somethign to whereever you wanted it to go.

The approach of videoing the screen (even with a high resolution camera) is
not trivial. You would have to distinguish between a small coloured point
and lots of other coloured areas - and of course cope with the image being
occluded from time to time (the presenter walks in front of it). I imagine
that you may also need to calibrate for each projector / camera / pointer /
environment - at least unless you spent a great deal on capturing such
situations to create some 'machine learning' test/optimisation set.

Having said all that, if you want to talk about this on a commerical bsis,
drop me an email (takeaway the TAKEAWAY)!


Iain
--
Iain Downs (DirectShow MVP)
Software Product Consultant
www.idcl.co.uk
.

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