Infra Red weirdness.....

[sdkid]

OK-- I have a few indoor cams in my basement home-theater room. We were watching a movie last night, and my wife was playing a game on her phone while the movie was running. I was skipping through my alerts, and there were a ton of them the whole time we were watching the movie. The WEIRD thing---- her android (Motorola) phone is blinking in random intervals apparently from the "selfie" camera in infra-red. This is Not a visible light blinking during the game.

The game is "Bubble Wars". It does not have camera permissions.

So-- Is this something related to automatic screen brightness -- sensing ambient light for the Adaptive Brightness setting??

 

[wittaj]

Hard to tell from that picture if it is from the front camera or if that is the screen. I am leaning towards it being the screen and the blinking is probably the out of sync frequencies between this camera and the phone screen. I can get that with some headlights that go by.

 

[Mike A.]

Yeah, hard to tell what's happening in that picture. Looks to me like that single bright spot is only from the top of the screen where the cam and other sensors are vs sync. I'd guess probably some sensor that tries to judge light levels or distance. Which specific phone? Probably can find what all it has there somewhere.

 

[bp2008]

IR light can be emitted by phones trying to detect distance to a nearby object. E.g. to decide if it is in a pocket, or if you're looking at the screen.

 

[sdkid]

Hard to tell from that picture if it is from the front camera or if that is the screen. I am leaning towards it being the screen and the blinking is probably the out of sync frequencies between this camera and the phone screen. I can get that with some headlights that go by.

The flashing is highly localized to the top of the screen. There is no camera "flash" led for the selfie cam. it was flashing randomly-- a flash or two, then nothing for 5 or 10 seconds, then 3 flashes in a second, then nothing... and so on...

IR light can be emitted by phones trying to detect distance to a nearby object. E.g. to decide if it is in a pocket, or if you're looking at the screen.

It Must be something like that.... I was just surprised to see an infra-red source from her phone.

 

[NightLife]

At least you can test it. Have her lock and unlock the phone and see if the IR flood goes nuts trying to scan her face. It could also be scanning for her face to see if she is still even looking at the screen, or if it should re-lock the phone. (Attentiveness scanning).

 

[DezertManiac]

is it visible on an actual video?

 

[Coachtech]

Turn your camera on on your phone and stand be hide hers while she is playing the game and point your camera at her phone and you should see the ir light in your screen. Works on anything that has a ir light use to check if ir is working on remotes