Photosensor array

The PhotosensorArray node, or photosensor array, is a node type that takes measurements from the simulation like a camera sensor. It perceives the visible light just like a standard camera sensor.

You can implement the photosensor array using different lens components. Each implementation dynamically creates a camera using specific Unity rendering settings.

The lens component accumulates the number of triggers that the camera controller sends to the photosensor array. During LateUpdate, if there has been at least one trigger during the last cycle, the lens component will use the appropriate scene sampler to render the scene once. The photosensor array node outputs Repeated Frames, the number of triggers that occurred during the last cycle, so that the single rendered frame can be repeated appropriately if necessary, while processing it once only.

The scene sampler fires the rendering of the camera and outputs the state of the camera buffer right before applying any post-processing. The quality of the output is dependent on the engine capability and the rendering settings.

Parameters

These parameters are common to all photosensor arrays:

Trigger

Writing a new structure to this input port indicates the node will render the simulation on the next Update.

The structure is empty for now.

ArrayWidth and ArrayHeight

These parameters define the amount of photosensor cells on the array. It's the number of pixels in the render buffer.

SensorWidth and SensorHeight

These parameters define the physical size of the photosensor. This is also combined with the lens focal length to define the camera field of view.

ExposureTime

This parameter sets the amount of time the photosensor is capturing light, in seconds.

Gain

The gain is the amplification factor applied to the captured light in software. 1.0 is the default gain. More than 1.0 produces brighter images, less than 1.0 produces darker images.

Order

This parameter allows the sensor designer to define an order of rendering if there are multiple photosensor arrays inside the same system graph. For a usage example, see the Parallel stereo camera system graph.

Bindings

The following bindings are common to all photosensor arrays.

Lens

The LensComponent binding samples the simulation and implements the lens behavior. The LensComponent also uses the transform position of the bound GameObject for positioning the photosensor array in the scene.

In PhotosensorArray, the LensComponent is displayed as Lens under the Bindings dropdown in the Inspector window and is also listed under the Bindings section in SystemGraph.