If you look through the NUI Forum you always see the question about which camera should i use for multi-touch?

The quick answer is: It’s depend on your budget and how much cameras you are trying to use at the same time.

I only have experience with three cameras that most of the multi-touch developer’s use :

PS3, Unibrain Fire-I and the PointGrey FireFly .

From my experience all cameras are sufficiently for the image processing you do with multi-touch and it’s more important to make the right filter settings on your software, or get the right light situation then to deal with the questions like: what’s the right sensor (CMOS/CCD?) . The cameras differ in price so what are the pro & cons of the models?

PS3: This seems to be the camera of choice for most of the multi-touch developers out there, and if you look at the price and it’s capabilities you know why. You get no cheaper camera with the same FPS. But there are some drawbacks you have to deal with: No cs-mount for objectives, you can’t mount the camera on ball-heads for adjustments and if you want to make a multi camera set-up you have to look for some third party driver.

Unibrain Fire-I: A good Firewire camera but with the lack of a real professional housing. There are a tripod mounting kit and some cs-mount adapter, but for the price you should get some more professional stuff.

PointGrey Firefly MV: This is a marvelous camera with an incredible driver suite.  PointGrey has a long time experience with multi-cam setups so you get a professional system, but this has it’s price. The real advance comes with multi-cam set-ups, but  you end up quickly in a 1000$ system only for cameras and objectives.

So for the first steps into multi-touch i prefer the PS3 . For that price you can’t go wrong! If you want to make huge multi-cam setups i prefer a Firewire PointGrey system, but this could change if the CL-Eye Platform (I’m will test in the future) deal with the USB bandwidth problems that most of the times arise with USB systems. If this will work the price difference will be so huge, that you could live with the PS3 drawbacks (no cs-mount,housing) .