Can the iphone 4’s front-facing camera be used as an optical directional pad that doesn’t occlude the screen with thumbs?
As inefficient as this might be, I was wondering if anyone has heard of someone trying this, or tried it themselves. Conjunction with Unity is always a plus. Thanks!
Welcome to the forum!
How could that be useful? A person’s thumb tip isn’t small enough to reliably block only a portion of the area in front of the lens.
I think he means similar to the optical trackball on something like a HTC Desire. I really don’t think you could get a camera to function in that way though.
maybe if the camera had a light in it and could focus on the finger print at that range, otherwise wont work, it’d be out of focus blur not worth tracking.
Interesting. Hadn’t heard of that before. Still, that’s a pretty terrible d-pad for anything except Pac-Man, Tron Light Cycles, or anything else where you can’t stop moving unless you hit something.
The major problem are its resolution which is laughable, its technology couldn’t work in pitch black and even more the framerate which is horrible.
I wonder, if the resolution is too low to see something like a partial block of the lens, maybe it could still be used to track movement (like a finger swipe) and use that for direction. It couldn’t be used as an analog stick, but it might be useful to change the direction of an auto-walking character.
Anything to keep that finger off the screen 
Doing something stupid for no good reason remains just that: stupid 
onscreen sticks and comparable are standard now for 3 years, the users are used to it and expect it.
Also, as nice as the virtual stick on HTC might sound, games don’t use it normally because its really shit annoying for controlling even compared to a bad touch screen
Cone on man, I don’t have trollface.jpg handy ; )
Just exploring an idea, nothing else. I personally don’t like on screen sticks, and would be happy to know alternatives, if they’re worthwhile.
hehe 
I know that exploring ideas is required. But only reasonable ones and in this case its trivial: don’t target mobiles if you don’t like their input schemes. I know that might sound arsy, but its a thing you have to get happy with early on or you will primarily find a lot of frustration because these input restrictions are there and its unlikely that it will change cause the game input addons will just remain that, addons.
there are 3 possible control schemes generally for iOS: Touch, gyro / accelerometer or a hybrid of it
Where as touch has 2: virtual stick or touch interaction (touch to move, touch to attack etc - see MiniGore as a good idea of how the two can be implemented in a good way)
gyro / accelerometer commonly only offer 1 but in form of hybrids with combination of “freeform touching somewhere” (to break in racing games for example) and alike they offer a lot of additional variations.
Also cases where gyro / acce really play out, you often don’t need touch input aside of this single freeform touch.
For me the offered input is fine enough, but as most others I’m aware that the most important thing when doing “non standard” games is prototyping. “thinking what will work” will never get oyu a good control. Implement the options in a simple setup and experience them, this will give you a 10 fold better end result.
It’s harmless exploration, that’s all.
You’d be better off looking into add on accessory, something that could plug into the iphone dock connector and send input to the device that way. but even still it’s limiting your games to the consumer having that accessory, or you having to write multiple input code to handle the consumers who dont… not like that is too big a deal
Resolution, frame rate, focal depth might not such huge roadblocks:
That’s the (shruken) input from the front-facing camera- seems like potentially enough to check points on the feed for hue/value to see what’s occluded. I can’t find official specs, but the frame rate doesn’t seem too shabby- it’s at least 24fps, possibly more- enough for a start.
The battery hit might still be ridiculous.
You can check your internal settings of your camera. a wonderful news for pc user now they can also use facetime on their pc just follow some instructions.