Exciting new tool! (Patreon)

If you've seen any of my videos, you've probably seen me trying to make crummy object tracking systems work with unreasonable performance. Microsoft kinects? Video cameras? Yuck. The speed that they track is slow and their accuracy is bad. At the end of the day you get barely adequate tracking performance and a hard life for me. I'm still recovering from the multi-week grind to get my pool tracking system acceptably accurate. 

As luck would have it, the folks at Optitrack have had a good laugh watching me flail trying to get my pitiful tracking systems working. They took the opportunity to hook me up with a very sweet camera system that does what I've been trying to do, only much better (and pricer). Getting access to otherwise inaccessible technology like this has been one of the best things about having a YouTube channel.

This system seriously puts all my previous tracking attempts to shame. It does full 3D tracking 10 times faster, 10-100x more accurately, and in an area 10x larger than my best attempts. It's also plug in play - you set the cameras up, wave a magic wand (literally) and you're ready track anything that reflects IR light. It's a set of eight (!) tracking cameras and should allow me to do even cooler projects, faster. They work by triangulating the real position of objects based on what multiple cameras see. It's the same thing your eyeballs do, except eight of them spread throughout my basement.

Aside from tracking basketballs flying through space, this system can also be used to measure things very accurately. That weird dart-like object in the first photo is a probe. Touch the tip to anything you want to measure and the cameras will tell you where it is to an accuracy of about 100 microns. Say I wanted to measure a car to retrofit a jet engine on? I could place the cameras around the car then use the probe to capture a ton of points. Throw those points into CAD and I can reconstruct the car. 

My next project is going to use the heck out of this system and I am so pumped. I'm going to use all of the speed and accuracy to (hopefully) do something mind blowing. It's an idea I've had for quite some time, but couldn't do because I didn't have good enough tracking. Stay tuned :)