Can a mouse become a webcam? This clever mod shows what can be done with an optical sensor

Ever wondered if you could use your mouse as a webcam? Of course you haven't - probably not, anyway - but someone did, and went ahead to complete a project that made this a reality (to an extent, we should add as a caveat).

As depicted on YouTube, Doctor Volt took an optical mouse and turned its sensor into a camera with a bit of high-tech tinkering (as flagged up by Hackaday, via Tom's Hardware).

The sensor was augmented with a wide-angle lens (made for a Raspberry Pi camera), and Doctor Volt used a third-party microcontroller (ESP32-S3 chip) in conjunction with the mouse sensor. Some 3D printing was required to make parts to hold the lens in place, too.

Add a good bit of messing around with software on top of that, and the optical sensor was turned into a camera that could capture some admittedly low-resolution and very hazy images, but nonetheless, it produced recognizable footage of Doctor Volt's satisfied face at the end of it all.

(Well, you can't actually see anything like a facial expression, we're just guessing - but this is a pretty impressive level of modding skill, so pats on the back are well deserved).

As many of the comments joke, the resulting image is, in fact, very much like typical security camera footage where you haven't a snowball's chance in hell of identifying the perp fleeing the scene.

Part of the problem with the limitations here is the sensor, and there's some musing about whether a modern gaming mouse with a much higher quality optical sensor might produce some meaningfully better results. Maybe a Version 2 of the mousecam is on the way...