Desire optical Pad = front camera?

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Hi,

in the German connect magazine I read about the optical sensor wich replaces the track ball.

They wrote it is a camera and works like an optical mouse.

Then I thought: Can this "camera" be used as a front camera for video telephoning ?

And that is literally my question.

All optical mice/trackpads are cameras: http://hackaday.com/2009/06/05/ds-optical-mouse-camera/

I doubt you will be able to do anything further than what is displayed in that video above.

thx.
So not really a good idea, because it is either low-res or working like makro-focus.

It should be noted that the "only" way you could use as a camera is though hacking the hardware (as he had done in the video).

There is no way (or: I would be really surprised if there where) to access the "camera" from within the Android-system.. Just as your computer doesn't care if it the mouse you plug in is optical or uses a "ball" (x-/y-sensors etc) Android just gets the data from the sensor in the same way as if it was a trackball (as in n1, Hero etc).

Originally Posted by Polarfuchs

Hi,

in the German connect magazine I read about the optical sensor wich replaces the track ball.

They wrote it is a camera and works like an optical mouse.

Then I thought: Can this "camera" be used as a front camera for video telephoning ?

And that is literally my question.

good idea, i actually thought about it once before (using an optical mouse as a cam). but then i figured out that whats inside the optical mouse is a crappy camera, very low resolution, that only sense wither there is something covering it or not, and the direction of that thing if it is moving.

so the answer is, even if someone managed to hack it and used it for video call, the other person will only see a shape of dark pixels (your face) moving

But, will it work like D-Pad?

For example, on Opera Mini, I can use it to navigate the screen ... or cant I?

@gogol
I think it only works like trackball, so you have to scroll many times over the sensor. You can't keep it going like a pressed button I think.

So we could even not touch it to swap from a page to another if it works like a mouse's laser right?
If our finger is about 1-2mm above it it will read movements

Originally Posted by vegetaleb

So we could even not touch it to swap from a page to another if it works like a mouse's laser right?
If our finger is about 1-2mm above it it will read movements

Now that is a very good question. I should imagine that if this were the case it would be very irritating as accidental scrolling would occur a lot. Now I reckon they wont want this so I suspect they have taken measures to prevent it. Perhaps the area around the lens has a capacitance sensor so that it only works if you are actually touching it.

I should have mine soon so I will do some experiments but this probably indicates an interesting little hardware quirk.

In theory you could lower the sensitivity(/how close the finger need to be to the sensor) by dimming the IR-light (But if it's dimmed too low you'll get a lot of lag instead).
Add to that the fairly small sensor (compared to an optical mouse) and the result would be that the finger needs to (almost) touch the surface/button to make the sensor react..

IMO it's most likely that HTC has tought of the problems with "false readings" etc, and compensated for it..

I doubt that it uses a capacitance sensor, as that would make it unusable with gloves etc.