Best method to stream large still image stream as movie-like texture

Questions & Answers
1

Hi,

I have the following scenario:

  • Input: sequence of large still images (~ 3000x1000 px) incoming at 30 Hz from a camera (connected via Firewire). This camera does not appear as webcam to the operating sytem (at least not out of the box, I suppose one could code a fake webcam). Format is e.g. JPEG, but I could do any format conversion in a separate process.
  • Wanted: whenever a new still image was grabbed from this camera, use it as texture in Unity (the texture is mapped to a mesh) with as little delay as possible
  • Platform: Camera and unity render client are all on the same Windows 7 x64 machine.

I’m looking for suggestions how to approach this problem for this particular situation (e.g. I don’t give a rats ass how performance would be on Mac, Android etc.). So far, I understand that unity supports:

  • import of textures from a webserver (I can’t imagine that this solution will be performing well, I’d expect the requests over HTTP to take longer than the ~33ms of time that are available)
  • having my separate process encode the still image sequence as movie, and use a movietexture (unsure about performance, but I’d like to rule it out because of the high latency).
  • writing a program that fakes a web-cam device, using the WebcamTexture feature of unity (is that a good idea?)
  • your suggestions!

I hope you guys can help me out :).

Cheers!

2

The last option works reasonably well.

An even better option is to work with shared memory. Let the host application write the image to shared memory, and write a native plugin that reads that image. Look at the example at the bottom of this page to see how a plugin can write pixels to a texture.