- Fry's doesn't seem to carry them in the store.
- Newer Apple computers come with an iSight built-in, so finding a new iSight may be difficult. (Actually, it seems like you can still buy them from the Apple Store...)
- The iSight requires Firewire. As the primary development machine will be an IBM Thinkpad--which doesn't have any Firewire ports--the camera will be unusable without additional equipment.
I installed the software that came with the camera and played around with it. The included software seems to come with a built-in face tracker. My informal tests showed that it wouldn't really track all that well; the camera wouldn't pan sometimes when my face disappeared from the picture. But no matter--I don't believe we're going to use this functionality in the software we'll be writing.
I also discovered something else--it turns out that video support doesn't cap out at 640x480. There's an additional "HD" mode--960x720--that seems to provide more information. There are two disadvantages to this mode, however. One is that pan/tilt doesn't work; the built-in software simply ignores any requests to move the camera. The other is that there is obvious lag; it doesn't operate at 30 frames per second like the 640x480 mode. Perhaps we can test the operation of our software in both modes.
Anyhow, I should study for finals and such. Good luck with yours also!
BTW: I also played around with DirectShow a bit and put everything I have so far up on Subversion. Using TortoiseSVN, access svn://svn.lifeafterking.org/cse190/. You'll need DirectShow .NET and Visual Studio 2005 to compile. Now I'm gone for real...
