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by nullc 2142 days ago
With the right level of integration the camera could subtract the image that is in front of it. That would requires having a pretty good model of the point spread function, perfect synchronization etc.

OLEDs have a fast response... I wonder if it would be possible to put the camera shutter and the oled out of phase enough to substantially dim it.

Perhaps polarization could be used to get better isolation.

With all the engineering required to do it, it might be much less expensive to have three or four cameras at the edges of the display, then extract a depth map and resynthesize an view from the perspective of the centre of the screen. :)

Plus that would give you bonus features like being able to automatically blur our or heavily denoise the background. :)

2 comments

> I wonder if it would be possible to put the camera shutter and the oled out of phase enough to substantially dim it.

That's a neat idea. It reminds me of the early fighter planes that fired bullets between the propeller blades by having the gun driven off the engine, timed so that the bullet passes through the plane of the propeller while the blades are not in the way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronization_gear

> I wonder if it would be possible to put the camera shutter and the oled out of phase enough to substantially dim it.

That is exactly the idea, to sync the camera to capture in between OLED pulses. It's not going to be perfect, but then to use computational photography to subtract whatever bleed of pixel color is left.

In theory, it should be totally workable. In practice, I'm not sure what the tradeoffs are in terms of acceptable image quality and resolution for the camera.