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.

When you remove just the IR blocking filter from the Ps3Eye you should still be able to see an image, it will have a kind of washed out effect as IR light has been added to the visible light but you can make it out no problem. It looks to me that for ‘camera 2’ on your diagram you have taken out more than just the IR blocking filter, I think you actually removed part of the lens as well….meaning that the image will not be focused correctly resulting in you not being able to see either visible light or IR light correctly, which is what your result looks like.

Here shows the what the IR blocking filter looks like when removed,  its not normally concaved, this would indicate it being part of the lens.
http://codelaboratories.com/research/view/ps3-eye-disassembly 

As far as I have experienced and am aware of ALL PS3eye cameras have IR blocking filters fitted…its a necessity to avoid unwanted interference. Anyone want to correct me on that?

See that’s my point. When I pulled off the camera housing there was ONLY one piece of glass visible on the sensor’s side of the lense. So naturally I figured that must be the IR filter, since in all th videos Ive watched the IR filter is the first piece of glass you come to. So I started digging it out. I was going off of the tutorials from Peu Productions at the time, who has some really great videos and photos of this. as I kept digging I knew something was off because I had to dig twice as deep as he did in his videos and photos.  the ONLY piece of glass that came out was the one shown in the photo diagram. There was NO IR filter at all. When I looked closer at Peu productions’ photos I also noticed the design of the lense plastic housing was slightly different as well. There was no recessed area on the inside where the IR filter should be. All of this that thinking there was no IR filter in that PS3 eye was confirmed by my second PS3 eye which had no modification whatsoever. I simply aimed an IR light source at it and the unmodified cam picked up the IR light. So yes I had appearently dug out a part of the lense in the first camera, but like I already ssaid there was no other piece of glass to remove or that was removed. What’s shown in the photo is all that came out of the lense housing. Thus my conclusion that these 2 PS3 eyes were not manufactured with IR filters.

fudge sickles… I wish I had seen this post before I bought my PS3 eye.  So that goes to show I found out the hard way that sony does manufacture the eye’s lense differently.

http://peauproductions.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-04-29T17:00:00-07:00&max;-results=2

So if anyone is building a multitouch display, be aware that this variation exists. That being said, it doesnt appear the “bad” lense filters out IR light though. in my photo diagram in my earlier post, I shined a remote with an IR LED (the light cant be be seen by the natural human eye) but the light shined brightly into the camera just fine.  Where he says in the article that the IR filter is in between the two lense pieces… I can only say I didnt see one in mine once the thick concave lense was removed.

So ultimately just be aware that this variation exists.