Rendering Real Time, Real Life Images into Textures

Unity Engine
1

My group and I are trying to render real time images from a real world camera into a texture for VR purposes. As far as I can see, the RenderTexture function has the functionality that is closest to what we want. I’m assuming that it places images generated in game into some folder that are then turned into textures. However, I think if we placed externally generated images into this folder instead, those images could be turned into textures. My problem is I can’t seem to find the actual definitions and code of the RenderTexture function in order to alter it for our purposes, and technical support is reserved for premium users (we are very poor). Do you guys know of any other VR groups that have done this or is there already a function to do this that I have overlooked? Thank you for any help you can provide!

EDIT: For clarity.

My apologies for the confusion, I will elaborate on the project. We are trying to develop a virtual reality microscope that will allow someone to move the sensor of the microscope by simply turning their head or through other body motions. A potential application could be surgeons having free hands while still controlling the camera looking into their patients.

The light of the microscope is fed into a camera which is processed in LabVIEW and then exported as video feed in real time (i.e. a bunch of images being generated). We would like to convert these images from LabVIEW into textures which are continuously placed on some object in the game space to be seen by the player wearing the headset, all in real time, while the microscope is running.

As for my question, the RenderTexture function is the only one I found that seems to do something similar to our goal. From my understanding, it takes images (normally generated from an in game camera), turns them into textures, and allows them to be placed on some surface in the game in real time as the game is running. Unless there is some fundamental difference between images of the game and images from a camera, I’m hopeful that this system could be slightly altered to allow images from another source to be continuously turned into textures and then placed in the game space. Any help would be very much appreciated. If I am still unclear please tell me what to explain.

2

Not really.

I’m not sure what you mean.

I think in general it’s not clear what you want to do. Take photos that you can then use as textures for … something?

3

My apologies for the confusion, I will elaborate on the project. We are trying to develop a virtual reality microscope that will allow someone to move the sensor of the microscope by simply turning their head or through other body motions. A potential application could be surgeons having free hands while still controlling the camera looking into their patients.

The light of the microscope is fed into a camera which is processed in LabVIEW and then exported as video feed in real time (i.e. a bunch of images being generated). We would like to convert these images from LabVIEW into textures which are continuously placed on some object in the game space to be seen by the player wearing the headset, all in real time, while the microscope is running.

As for my question, the RenderTexture function is the only one I found that seems to do something similar to our goal. From my understanding, it takes images (normally generated from an in game camera), turns them into textures, and allows them to be placed on some surface in the game in real time as the game is running. Unless there is some fundamental difference between images of the game and images from a camera, I’m hopeful that this system could be slightly altered to allow images from another source to be continuously turned into textures and then placed in the game space. Any help would be very much appreciated. If I am still unclear please tell me what to explain.

4

I now roughly understand what you want to do.

That’s not quite right. A rendertexture typically lives in memory. You can write to it and you can read it, but generally it doesn’t get saved to any folder.

I think what you’re looking is actually closer to these two:

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ImageConversion.LoadImage.html
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/WWW.LoadImageIntoTexture.html