I was recently introduced to this auto tracking camera which costs less than $100 and features 1080 (30P) resolution. The auto track camera is from a company called AiCOCO, and it was advertised as Mac and Windows only. I’m pleased to report that it works with Linux too; I plugged the camera into my Raspberry Pi 4, and it was immediately recognized as a camera.
https://vu.zone/video/ndi-cameras/QJ0dNk28eLOv
Basically, this is an automatic tracking webcam, but it’s useful far beyond just video conferencing and Zoom calls. This auto tracking cam is instantly ready to be used with Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) which can output to popular video streaming services like StreamPlay, YouTube, and Twitch.
Auto Tracking Camera Issues
Effectively, this is a tiny little robot camera operator that will tirelessly follow you around the room and he won’t ever get tired, so you’ll always be in frame… except for those times when the tracking gets confused, which happened a few times during my few hours of testing.
Overall, I think the video quality from this auto-tracking camera is impressive. I’ve output the 1080 30P video signal through OBS software and I think the end result is sufficiently high quality for web-streaming in 2022.
Zooming With An Auto Tracking Camera
I particularly like the flexibility of the zoom-in feature, which is activated by raising one hand and forming an “L” with your thumb and index finger.
This will zoom the camera in about 25%, and if you keep your “L” shape held up, the camera will zoom in another 25%. Then it will zoom back out, in a similar fashion with the same gesture.
The gesture-based zoom quality was high enough that it was useful, but it was likely a digital-zoom, which leads to additional pixelation of an already cropped-in image.
Check out the “AiCOCO 2K Web Cam with Ai Auto Tracking” here on Amazon, via my affiliate link.