The Eye Tribe

Turning a Regular Smartphone Camera into a 3-D One

Microsoft researchers say simple hardware changes and machine learning techniques let a regular smartphone camera act as a depth sensor.

Yet while efforts like Google’s Project Tango are adding depth cameras into mobile gadgets, new research from Microsoft shows that with some simple modifications and machine-learning techniques an ordinary smartphone camera or webcam can be used as a 3-D depth camera.
The idea is to make access to developing 3-D applications easier by lowering the costs and technical barriers to entry for such devices, and to make the 3-D depth cameras themselves much smaller and less power-hungry.
Microsoft modified camera

Hands up: Researchers at Microsoft modified the camera on a smartphone so it can capture the depth of hands and faces.

A group led by Sean Ryan Fanello, Cem Keskin, and Shahram Izadi of Microsoft Research is due to present a paper on the work Tuesday at Siggraph, a computer graphics and interaction conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

To modify the cameras, the group removed the near infrared filter, often used in everyday cameras to block normally unwanted light signals in pictures.
Then they added a filter that only allowed infrared light through, along with a ring of several cheap near-infrared LEDs.
By doing so, they essentially made each camera act as an infrared camera.