DIY Realtime 3D Motion Tracker [3-DOF]
Updated: 17th March 2015
About
A project to create a poor man's 3D motion tracker using simple software, a light source and a basic webcam to control and manipulate objects in a 3D environment (e.g. Virtual Reality controller).
Capturing movement
Using a simple 'led dot marker' tracking technique found in computer vision (head trackers Freetrack or TrackIR) I can easily track a single point of light seen through a webcam and capture it's location mathematically. Tracking the location of this marker on screen enables me to compute accurate position or rotation angles which can be used to position or rotate a 3D camera or 3d object on screen.
Enhancement
Currently this single LED dot tracker only captures 3-DOF [pitch, yaw angles and depth. Adding more dot markers would enable me to capture other angle directional movement (left/right, up/down and ROLL).
Usage
The VFWgrab utility is used to capture images from the webcam and store them
Download
Coming soon
Programming
Visual Basic 6
Naughter Webcam VFWGrab 1.07