2 things. 1. Is there an ideal height for mounting the camera? 2. hows the new t265 compared to the d435? Specifically for fast motion at a somewhat close distance - say a person punch towards the camera from 2-5 feet away? Would the t265 be a step up?

[MartyG · Accepted solution]

Hi ARoth4,

In answer to your questions:

1. The D435 should be 20 cm or more away from the the target it is observing, as 20 cm is its minimum sensing distance. You could mount the camera up to 3 meters from the target before you start to see depth accuracy drift noticably. The maximum depth sensing range of the D435 is 10 meters.

2. The T265 does not have depth sensing, so it cannot be directly compared to the D435 in that way if you planned to achieve your project with depth sensing.

A reason for using T265 instead of D435 is if you need very high quality tracking. Otherwise, the D435i (the model of D435 that has the same IMU component as the T265) will be sufficient.

If you need both depth sensing and very high quality tracking, you can pair a D435 with a T265.

The guide below for getting data from D435i or T265 may be useful to you.

https://realsense.intel.com/how-to-getting-imu-data-from-d435i-and-t265/

[ARoth4]

Good. That's plenty of room to work with.

On tracking cameras - what exactly do they do - I'm googling it and I'm not sure what data they are returning. Stereo gives me depth and the T series looks like stereo. I just work with the tables returned from the camera and don't know much about hardware so it's a hole in my knowledge. I know people work on non-depth tracking algorithms that rely on color and tone gradiations but what does the camera itself do that a normal (RGB) camera doesn't? In other words what data table do I get from the tracking camera? Maybe it's' a solution I should look at. Thanks.