11:37 AM 4/6/02
My first thoughts on designing a photoroom are:
1) It has to be spacious enough a person can dodge around in it.
2) It has to be compact enough to fit in arcades.

My solution is to make the setup possibly modular. Since I plan on using X cameras for the resolution... The less number of cameras could mean a smaller geometry of the room... 3 cameras = a triangle. 4 = square, 5 = pentagon, etc... each one would be progressively larger as well.... Its just a possible guess.

For right now, I need to focus on having one camera that can see your whole body most of the time. So I need to know the angle of camera's eye, and how far it sees, etc... I'm going to collect miscellaneous data now, and make sense of it after I've got the data. I'm moving my one computer into the photoroom now.
Ok, so I learned my camera has 1.5 meter X span and a 1.5 meter Y span at a distance of 2 meters from the camera.
So I just need to solve for the angle which is easy.
Arctan(.75/2) or Arctan(3/8) = angle... Its times like this I miss having lost my TI85.
I need to compute the arctan... with no calculator or lookup table... Its right around 30 degrees... but I need the exact amount for whatever reason.
Holy, I broke out Turbo C for the 286 :) It has a nice documentation program, I found out arctan is: 20.5 degrees... So the camera has an angle of 20 degrees... 12:30 PM 4/6/02 Optimally I want to find a camera with as large as angle as possible so I think its time to go shopping :)
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Some things I need to do while I'm out are:
1) Pick up 2 Ethernet cables.
2) Pick up an ultra cheap harddrive, 1-2 gig.
3) Get a white background. Likely just a sheet, maybe from goodwill.
4) Shop around for digital cameras and web cams.
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So I went out, visited some relatives. Picked up a white bed sheet... EThernet cables are going for like 10$ a pop, I'm not paying that. No harddrives found for sale. Digital camera shopping at Sears was cramped because it was someone's retirement party so I said skip it, not like I had money to buy one anyway, was just going to test angles, to see if its standard at 20 degrees... I'll try with my camcorder now to test... Then I need to design the room some more.
Yeah my camcorder has a wider angle of vision... Hmm. This could be a great design flaw if I assume my final camera I'll be using has the same angle of vision. I don't know how angle of vison would play in either... Well its something to think about before I go on further.
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1:07 PM 4/7/02 Some possible ideas... I want a person in full view of the camera as much as possible, maybe I need mirror tricks or magnifying lenses... 1:53 PM 4/7/02 Huh. This is tough. I'll play some warcraft3/excercise and ignore it for a bit.4:06 PM 4/7/02 I'll figure this out sometime. Now its time to shotgun the resume around some more.
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7:20 PM 4/10/02 this is tough. I duct taped the camera up on the wall, and I am trying to conceptualize the field of vision... Basically my problem was that to get my full body in the field of vision, I'd have to give the camera 15'.... Then another 15' for the area where I can move around on... Thats too much space... 15+15 =30 ft + another 15 for the camera on the opposite side... 45x45 feet is too huge for a gaming chamber. I'm tryin something more like 20x20... I'm aiming the camera down on a slant, so it sees my feet half the time, the other camera on the opposite side will see the other half of the floor... Side cameras will overlap and help resolution some. I will hardly ever be in the full frame of vision though... So my program will need to interpret fragments of knowledge...
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7:27 PM 4/10/02 For the heck of it, I'll try and get some help getting Crystal Space working on DJGPP.