The Rebirth of Webcam Apps

The release of the first commercial webcam in the mid ’90s (the Logitech QuickCam) sparked a flurry of interactive webcam applications that continues to this day.  Apps have ranged from mini-games to creative visual filters to video recording to rudimentary motion tracking. Over the last decade the webcam went from being a specialized peripheral to a built-in component of most mid-tier laptops.  It’s even sparked a new field of study – Computer Vision.

Nowadays, the explosion of mobile devices has put a webcam in everyone’s pocket, and exciting things were bound to happen.

The past year I had the opportunity to research Computer Vision for a course on motion tracking and I opted to explore how web technologies could push webcams to their limit.  After creating many smaller demos [ 1 2 3 4 6 7 ], I ended up creating a more complex basketball mini-game [ 5 ] that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago.

Here are some interesting things I found during my studies:

• Even many people deeply involved in the field of Computer Vision weren’t aware of the potential of HTML5 to spur innovation.
• Because they don’t require any special plugins, experiments like the ones I’ve created shock people who think of webcam apps as being complicated to install and run.
• Once you strip away the awkwardness of installs and plugins, people find webcam apps to be delightful.  Children in particular fall in love with them.
• Unfortunatley the most widely known libraries (e.g. OpenCV) are not broadly available for web front-end development.  There are some good implementations of selected algorithms though.
• The technology is still a bit raw, and creating fun interactions requires a deep knowledge of the underlying algorithms.  A few stray lines of code could mean the difference between success and endless loading spinners.

This field is just starting get hot again.  Add social networks, gamification, fast connections, cheap storage, big data, augmented reality, and devices like the Kinect into the mix and who knows where it’ll go.  We’re no longer limited by technology.  We can build great things.