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Originally Posted by Biff
As a television engineer I have worked with cameras for over 25 years. Glib comments about "it's just another item you have to work around" don't help. Our attempts at getting anything useful out of our camera system were utter failures.
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Biff,
I think that you have to agree that for all that was tried in vision systems, many teams didn't understand the variable nature of field lighting and white balance. At three regionals and the nationals, lighting was variable and different from either side of the field. I saw the vision tetra go black at one regional when viewed from the player station. You understand the intricacies of color matching with different light sources and know that the camera supplied just didn't have enough tweaks to get 100% but the majority of teams did not. I would be surprised that FIRST paid for the black out drape just to help out vision seekers based on regional results. It could have been more easily (cheaply) handled with lighting at the player station and would have been more easier to control the variations from field to field.
There were enough tools to compensate for most problems but they take memory and code to implement. Vision was not as easy as it appeared for the CMU project in a small room. I think it was a good exeercise for auto mode but would have liked to see the camera in the hands of teams in September. If we are going to use it next year, we should be told now, so some learning and testing can be performed. We don't need to know the game to do that just that the camera will be included and what the color(s) will be. I would like to see the same colors used next year so teams can build on what they already know.
For those who didn't try but would like to in the future...Green for you isn't the same green for a camera. Your brain gets in the way and can tell a lot about what is out in front of your eyes. A camera cannot make those decisions and the same color in slightly different light looks like a compleely different color to a camera. Green can be black or white or even blue under the right lighting conditions.