Hi just replying as requested via the Kickstarter comments.
So managed to calibrate the lens with the phone after a few attempts. My main issues are trying to get the markers to light up green. Noticed it requires a lot of light as the Android app doesn’t seem to have access to the standard camera. It appears a lot darker within ZapBox and I think that’s what’s causing the problems that and unfortunately the phone doesn’t have manual controls. Running Android 6.0.1 if that helps.
Thanks
Thanks for the report.
It’s weird the camera is darker than in the camera app - that is sometimes the case after pressing the lock icon and switching to manual mode, but before then it should be using pretty vanilla android camera API.
We could do with some more of these decent spec’ed Chinese imports in our testing pool so I’ll try to get hold of one here.
Our one arrived today. Its a nice device for the price, feels quite high-end. From what I could tell the camera brightness was similar to the camera app.
Unfortunately as you say the manual modes are not supported (the camera2 API runs in legacy mode) so there’s not an easy option to improve things, other than the general improvements we’ll be making to coping with blurred images.
Thanks it’d be interested to see what you’re able to do with limited access. Unless there’s way of figuring out how the camera gets access to the API?
The stock app doesn’t have manual controls either as far as I can see. It does have a slow-motion mode that gives shorter exposure on the preview frames, but that only seems to happen when actually recording the video. It would take reverse engineering to try to figure out the private messages sent to the camera to enable the slow-motion mode if we wanted to get the same thing in ZapBox.
Given there’s no guarantee of success and it’s quite a bit of effort, that reverse engineering isn’t something I can commit to doing.
We will definitely be aiming to improve the quality of tracking with blurred images though.
I’ve done a bit more digging here and found that the stock app lets you set ISO to 1600 in camera settings, which also then seems to apply to the preview stream and gives much reduced blur. I’ve also found an app on the play store (Bacon Camera) that is able to offer manual focus on this device too.
Seems to be a case of using the old camera API and setting some undocumented parameters. I reckon that’s something we should be able to figure out, which should give a big step up in tracking quality on this device (and hopefully others using similar MediaTek processors). I’ll post again here when there’s something for you to test.