Multiple Webcams On One Machine
After some time working on computer vision projects, most people get bored of using just one camera and decide to go for stereo-vision. Afterall, once you've gotten over the pain of getting a pixel array from your camera in your language of choice, how hard can it be to get arrays from multiple cameras?
UGH.
After ordering two of Creative's Live! Ultra webcams for their deliciously wide-angle lenses and tasty USB2 speeds, I found out that Creative's drivers don't allow the simultaneous use of multiple cameras. In fact, if you want to get input from multiple cameras you have two choices:
- Use cameras that have differing drivers (ie cams from different manufacturers). You then have to find a pair of cameras whose barrel distortion, mounting dimensions, field of view and framerate are all the same. Blech.
- Use Logitech Quickcams (their drivers let you do it in XP).
I suppose that this is my punishment for straying from Logitech (whose cameras I love) to Creative (whose past cameras have all sucked).
Update: In what may be a series, you can now read followup information on this.