I made a discovery about the PS3 eye recently that some might find interesting. Im building a multi touch display and using the PS3 eye with a bandpass filter to track the movement of the touch screen. If you’re like me and looked at a bunch of tutorials online on how to remove the IR blocking filter in the camera’s lense, then you will also know that you must replace it with a band pass filter that will block out visible light and only allow IR light to come through. So normally this is no big deal but I happened to buy 2 PS3 eyes. I took the first one out of its package and started to get to work on ripping it apart to get to the lense to dig out the IR filter. This took forever, and I mean a lot longer than it really should have, and it was way more difficult than anyone online had dealt with. When it was all said and done, the camera was no longer able to see anything but a big fuzzy blob. I thought there was no way the sensor was damaged, it looks perfect, Maybe its the PS3 eye driver. It was flickering and it was full of static. So I decided to trouble shoot with the other brand new PS3 eye. It worked a lot better with the PS3eye driver, but it was still getting the static banding in the test window. But at least Iwas getting a picture. As I started looking at photos of the PS3 eye’s IR filter online, I noticed it looked different than what I had. Mine was double the thickness, and it was concave on the inside. I thought omg I bet this thing is part of the lense. If thats the case than Im kinda screwed. I thought This will never work but what if I took a remote control with an IR LED and shined it into the unmodified camera… surely this IR blocker that Im supposed to remove will filter it out. BUT It didnt. The unmodified PS3 eye DIDNT filter out the IR light. All I had to do was tape the bandpass filter over top of the outside of the lense (cheap I know) but Ill do something better later. So unless Im wrong or this is a fluke it looks as though Sony no longer puts an IR blocking filter in its camera, and instead has put a thick extra concave lense. Im also wondering if this manufacturing difference is in part why my PS3 eye has the static banding flicker. Here is a photo diagram of my experiment and results.
http://www.particle9productions.com/downloads/ps3eye.jpg
Also, yes the little supposed IR filter cracked a bit on the sides where I used the xacto knife to pry it out. but the lense in the plastic housing is perfectly fine as is the board’s image sensor. I hope this helps someone who might have the same issue in the future becuase I have no idea where else to put this online.