The exposure settings, they do nothing. PS3Eye tracking only works in low lighting.

[cboulay]

In OSX, pushing the globe against the iSight camera automatically lowers its exposure, so that works.

When using the PS3Eye in Windows or OSX, tracking only works in low-light conditions. I think many people get this problem. See #141

in psmove_tracker_new_with_camera(int camera), there is a call to psmove_tracker_set_exposure(tracker, Exposure_LOW);

In psmove_tracker_set_exposure(PSMoveTracker *tracker, enum PSMoveTracker_Exposure exposure), target_luminance is set depending on the exposure input, with Exposure_LOW yielding target_luminance = 0;

Then it calls
tracker->exposure = psmove_tracker_adapt_to_light(tracker, target_luminance);

That function has an algorithm to adapt the exposure setting to yield the target_luminance. When target_luminance==0, it immediately returns with minimum_exposure: 2051;

Then
camera_control_set_parameters(tracker->cc, 0, 0, 0, tracker->exposure, 0, 0xffff, 0xffff, 0xffff, -1, -1);

For reference, here's the function declaration.
camera_control_set_parameters(CameraControl* cc, int autoE, int autoG, int autoWB, int exposure, int gain, int wbRed, int wbGreen, int wbBlue, int contrast, int brightness)

That function is platform specific. In Windows, using the PSEYE, it sets a registry key with these values, then restarts camera capture with openCV. This calls cvCreateCameraCapture( cameraID );

As far as I can tell, this function does not care what's in the registry.

In OSX, we just get a warning: psmove_WARNING("Unimplemented: Setting of PS3EYEDriver parameters\n");

[cboulay]

I fixed this problem for Windows in my own fork. I made quite a few changes in my own fork that I'm not sure you want to merge upstream. For example, I removed PS3EYEDriver as a submodule.

[thp]

If you have a fix, I'd still be interested in getting it merged upstream. Any chance we could do that? ;)

[peoro]

I'm having a related issue on Linux. Apparently psmoveapi sets auto exposure to 0 (v4l2_set_control(fd, V4L2_CID_EXPOSURE_AUTO, autoE); in camera_control_set_parameters, called by psmove_tracker_set_exposure, psmove_tracker_new_with_camera, psmove_tracker_new).

With my camera (PS3Eye, using GSPCA/OV534 USB Camera Driver), having auto exposure set to 0 means enabling the auto exposure. I found out that V4L2_CID_EXPOSURE_AUTO needs to be set to 65535 (which is different from V4L2_EXPOSURE_MANUAL, WTF?) in order to disable auto exposure.

I don't understand what's going on, and wouldn't know how to fix this issue in a clean way.
I decided to have camera_control_set_parameters returning immediately without doing anything, and to manually control the camera settings using v4l2-ctl (v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 -c auto_exposure=1 to set manual exposure, v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 -c exposure=10 to control the exposure level etc).

Hope this can help!

@peoronoob thanks, it did help in my case too!

[alessiodeltrecco]

Hi, i think i've found a solution, at least for Linux it's working...
After some researches and tests, based on the infos contained in @peoro's reply, i've modified psmove_tracker.c changing all the calls to camera_control_set_parameters from:

camera_control_set_parameters(tracker->cc, 0, 0, 0, tracker->settings.camera_exposure,
		0, 0xffff, 0xffff, 0xffff, -1, -1, tracker->settings.camera_mirror);

to:

camera_control_set_parameters(tracker->cc, 65535, 0, 0, tracker->settings.camera_exposure,
		0, 0xffff, 0xffff, 0xffff, -1, -1, tracker->settings.camera_mirror);

and it worked 😍

Hope this helps and the fix could be merged upstream

Here's my modified file: psmove_tracker.zip