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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting...was it an effect based on attenuation of the light? i.e. reflected photons from close objects will attenuate less than ones further away therefore intensity will be higher?

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Something along those lines, but they also did something clever with the timing of emitting IR flashes and correlating the received number of photons with those flashes. I really wish I could recall more clearly, but I looked into it around 2007 - 2008. I tried finding the white paper, but all the links are dead :-( I might have a copy lying around, though... I'll try to dig that up.

Don't sweat it, I just think that if that's the method, it's a really cool hack.

Eureka! Found it on scribd:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/40735369/Can-Esta-101

Thanks for the link :) Do you happen to know how to download the pdf off scribd? It looks like you need to pay scribd to do it (or to read past the first few pages), which doesn't quite seem fair since I'm assuming they don't have a license to the content themselves, in which case it'd be someone else's copyrighted content they're profiting off...

Can't get it off scribd, but thanks to the magic of archive.org (seriously! amazing stuff), the entire pre-purchase canesta website is still up. Just look prior to mid 2010 or so. Here's the exact pdf in question:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091122234143/http://www.canest...

Yeah, that was a pretty big turn-off. Scribd is already on my groan-when-I-go-there sites, but I'm pretty sure a service that lets me download a pdf is not something I'm interested in paying for since that was invented decades ago when it was called ftp.

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