Success!
I now have 3d head tracking working in Python-Ogre. It is very cool, albeit a little jittery due to the graininess of the webcam images I think. I ended up finding an implementation of Alter’s algorithm for 3d pose estimation along with POSIT. They were in Pascal of all languages. I didn’t think people still used that one– I certainly haven’t in 15 years maybe. Alter’s was easier to use and seems to give pretty good results. I get about 30 fps with Python doing the image processing (identification of where the IR LEDs are on the image) and 3d pose determination.
The effect is really nice. I can even spread it out over two of my 3 monitors. The third is unfortunately run by a separate graphics card, so Ogre won’t render to both at the same time. Maybe some hacking would fix it, but in the other room is my video projector if I want to get crazy..
I’m debating on using the second camera to track a stick of some sort. I have a very amusing magic wand from my LARP days that is just begging to become an input device. That would be cool because I could add physics into the demo and knock things around with the wand.
A cool other use I found for this setup is never having to lose my mouse again. I have three screens on my main system, two on my old computer, and one on my laptop. All of which are connected by synergy. So, I find myself losing my mouse pointer fairly often. While playing with some open source head tracking software, I had it controlling the mouse and found that the mouse was always on the monitor I was looking at. Speaking of that tracking software, even though the result of my tracking is waaay more jittery, it felt a lot more realistic than the other one.
I should really get back to MV3D though, but let me tell you, the ticket for adding mouse-look is getting upped in priority. 