Does this make the Pi webcam a viable project now?
I looked into making one during the pandemic - but i think lack of auto-focus was one of the things that caused me to rule it out at the time…
I looked into making one during the pandemic - but i think lack of auto-focus was one of the things that caused me to rule it out at the time…
But before getting a better camera I'd try to improve lighting, try to have lots of uniform white diffused light coming from at or behind the camera; simple things like white LED strips at the back of the monitor bounced off a wall or other surface behind it can work well because Teams/Zoom will compress and shrink your video to death anyway, so high resolution and fine detail are wasted, but a kinda well-lit person will still look decent even in a tiny and brutally compressed thumbnail on a laptop screen and I'm not aware of any AI filter that actually does a good job at simulating that, and any that did probably wouldn't fit on a Raspberry Pi anyway.
And before doing even that, I'd make sure my audio is actually decent, since that's what most people take for granted since it is for granted in real-life meetings, but being hard to understand or sounding harsh and jarring is something people react to a lot more strongly and viscerally to than bad-ish video, often without even realizing that's what bothers them about a person. Think of it like meeting to get work done in a dimly-lit room vs. in the middle of a construction site – people sometimes do the former on purpose, e.g. to improve projector image quality, but the latter will feel jarring to most, especially if you're the only person who sounds like that. Important to use the test call functionality in Zoom/Teams/... since their compression may reduce quality by a lot. External USB microphones can be a good inexpensive option, something like a Behringer C-1U, anything bluetooth tends to sound rather ugly.
And before doing even that, I'd think real hard if even that's actually needed. Most people seem to not give a damn and are just fine not sounding and looking like a newsperson. There might be more profitable things to put that time and money towards.
Maybe people have a different setup that I, but I usually remain the same distance away from my monitor at most times.
I'm guessing you mean "shallow depth of field" rather than "sharp" here.
And you probably don't want it to be so shallow so a few centimeters would matter, then your nose could be in focus but your ears not, or vice-versa. That's a bit too shallow.
It also doesn't require auto-focus, it requires you to be able to put the camera at a good distance with the correct f-stop, or being able to change the f-stop one way or another.
Auto-focus is more for cases when the subject/object moves a lot forward/backward from the perspective of the camera, so you don't have to manually adjust things.
I doubt a small sensor auto-focus camera will achieve that though.
Webcams in poor lighting conditions benefit from autofocus, because autofocus makes it easier to use a larger aperture, improving low light performance.
Laptop webcams benefit from autofocus because there's no room for manual focus controls, and the distance to the user will vary substantially depending on if the laptop's in a docking station, if the user's leaning in to read some small text, etc.
Meeting room webcams benefit from autofocus so you don't need a technician to attend every time it gets knocked out of focus.
PC webcams sometimes benefit from autofocus, because the cable usually weighs more than the camera, meaning the camera often gets moved and knocked about. Plus about 95% of home users with manual focus webcams don't even know they need to focus them.
Streamers have great lighting and cameras firmly mounted on solid tripods - but they're often using mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras, so they get autofocus for free anyway.
Back then you needed a Pi Zero for USB device mode and a specific software version for this to be supported other than that it just worked.