Exposing Yourself to the Web
by Larry Gilbert
What would George Orwell think? One chilling
prophecy of his
most well-known novel, 1984, has come true within 11 years of the time it
portrays. Television cameras, linked by a global electronic network,
peer at streets, offices, and households throughout the world--and
more are being linked up every day.
However, that probably wouldn't have surprised him as much as the fact
that anyone is allowed to take a peek through these digital
port-holes. And what would he make of the reasons why more and more
people are willingly making these cameras available: admiration of parrots
and fish? remote operation of model railroads? monitoring of a coffee
pot across the building (or across the Atlantic)? sales of chia planters?!
The World Wide Web has spawned a curious Internet-wide fad: ``Web
cams''. And curiosity may well be what keeps the idea going. Browsing a
list of such cameras is like being a virtual tourist or (some might
accuse) a Web voyeur. While it may take a bit of an intuitive leap to
think of a Web page as being somewhere else in the world, having an
up-to-the-minute snapshot on the page drives the point home to
anyone. How else can one explain the fascination with gazing at a bus
terminal in Berlin, mountains in Norway, an iguana cage in California,
a home office in Texas, or a total stranger's feet in the UK?
You who are reading this magazine may already be caught up in this
fad, looking to get in on it in your own little way. That's what this
article hopes to help you do, first by summarizing what makes a Web
cam tick, then by pointing you toward more specific information
available on the net.
Methods To The Madness
People open up their vistas to the Web for many reasons. Some of
the main ones:
Utility
- This is how the original Web cam got its start--and it wasn't
even on the Web. In 1991, people working at the University of Cambridge
Computer Lab pointed a camera at the lab's coffee pot, hooked the camera
up to a computer with a video capture board, and set it up to act as an
image server. Thus anyone in the building on the lab's network could see
the status of the coffee pot without needlessly traipsing up several
flights of stairs for a caffeine fix. The camera actually didn't appear
on the Web until much later, but as near as anyone can tell, it is still
the first and most famous. (Quentin Stafford-Fraser has written an amusing
history of the coffee pot.)
Promotion
- This is the most popular reason for setting up a Web
cam. A number of hardware manufacturers and Internet service providers
use their cameras as a draw for their other pages in order to hawk
their goods. Some tourist spots (such as the Rhonda Smith Windsurfing
Center on the Columbia River Gorge) have cameras set up to let people
marvel at the view. A novelty company in California even trained a
camera on one of its chia planters, presuming people would sit and
watch the thing grow (perhaps someone does).
Self-expression
- Like wearing a loud tie or festooning your car with
plastic toys, setting up a unique Web cam is a good way to attract
attention, for better or worse. I can think of no other purpose for things
like Nick's Feet Cam in Great Britain or the ``ShuttleCam'' that Dr. Ritchey
Ruff set up to display the status of the model dangling from his office's
ceiling.
Philanthropy?
- The spirit of generosity that permeates the Web may
inspire you to set up a camera of your own. Even now, you may be saying to
yourself, ``By golly, I want to give something back to this wonderful
virtual community! I'm going to point a camera at the moldy pickles in my
fridge and hook it up to the Web for the whole world to see! But... where
do I start?''
Four Steps To Becoming A Web Exhibitionist
Assuming you've already decided on your planned Web cam's purpose
(or lack thereof), setting it up involves tackling four main problems.
- 1. Finding a camera
-
Having a video camera is a rather important
requirement. If you are lucky enough to have a workstation with
teleconferencing capability already set up, then half your work is
already done (assuming you want to broadcast your stony
staring-at-the-CRT face to the computing world at large). You may
also have the good fortune of working for a company or institution
with a security camera located somewhere interesting. Then, if you're
persuasive enough, you might be allowed to tap into the video from
that. But the odds are getting a camera will be your responsibility. A
consumer-grade camcorder should work fine, and is much cheaper if you
happen to own one already; you might even want to use the time-stamp
feature to give your live shot a smidge more authority. You
could do the bargain-hunting thing at a used camera shop, but bear in
mind that an older tube-based camera may not enjoy being left on
full-time and will eventually burn out; newer CCD-based cameras are
more durable in that respect. In any case, take care that the output
from the camera will be standard enough to match the input on your
video capture device (see the next step). One inexpensive alternative
for Macintosh users is the Connetix QuickCam, a small camera that
requires no additional video hardware. It has been used successfully
as a Web camera, but the picture is small and in black-and-white--less
than ideal for things like showing off that booming organic
vegetable garden.
-
2. Getting video into your computer
-
Once you've found a camera
with standard video output, you'll need a video capture device or
``frame grabber''. As mentioned above, some cameras don't require one,
but most do. Some lucky people, like those with a Macintosh Quadra AV
or an SGI Indy, don't have to worry about this part--they've got video
inputs built into their machines. But the rest of you need not panic;
frame grabbers are easy to find at most computer stores, some as low
as $200. They're available from a number of manufacturers, including
Creative Labs, Vigra, Radius, Play, and others.
-
3. Getting it on the Web
-
Once you're finished setting up your
hardware and expending your Visa card, you'll have to get your
computer to grab a video image from your camera and store it at a
regular interval. Then the image has to be stored as a GIF or JPEG on
a public HTTP server if anyone's going to look at it. (Setting up an
HTTP server is a matter for another article, but there's plenty of
information about that on the Web already). [And coming up in this
magazine. -Ed])
One of the most commonly-used setups works this way: A
script (or batch file to you DOS heads) executes the appropriate
frame-grabbing utility, runs a conversion utility to go from the frame
grabber's image format to GIF or JPEG, copies the final image to an
HTTP server via a local network connection, and the whole process
repeats after a time. This process allows a low-cost computer to act as a
dedicated camera server and lets the big, powerful HTTP server handle
all the image requests. It is also a good setup choice when the camera
is on a remote computer with no connection to the outside world other
than PPP or SLIP (in that case the camera server has to do a dial-up
and a login every time it has to copy an image). If the computer with
the camera is powerful enough, and if it has a high-speed net
connection, it can act as the HTTP server itself. Then, instead of
linking to a stored image file, the camera link on your server can
link to a CGI script that grabs a video frame and converts it on the
fly, providing a truly live snapshot. (Got that?) If you wanted to get
really fancy--and if you don't give a rip about browser
compatibility--you could take advantage of ``client pull'' or ``server
push''; on browsers like Netscape Navigator to provide continuous,
albeit painfully s-l-o-w, real-time video. Cool.
This sounds like a lot of work, but at this point you have yet to solve the
toughest problem of all...
-
4. Explaining all this to your friends and family
-
Yes, it's likely that most people in your life just don't understand what the
World Wide Web is, let alone why you might get excited about hooking
all this equipment up to it for no apparent reason other than to let
others invade your privacy. How might you sum things up for them in a
nutshell? Here's some ideas for what to tell them:
- You're providing the world at large with unique insight into
your life and culture (after all, there are people in some countries
who have never seen moldy pickles).
- You're exploring creative new uses of technology that just might
land you that plum job at Microsoft. (Or Apple, or Xerox, or AT&T, or...)
- You're pioneering one of the first of those 500 cable TV
channels everyone's going to get someday.
Wherever George Orwell is, you're giving him something to
laugh about.
Larry Gilbert is a technical support person and computer geek
at-large who lives in Seattle. He spends too much of his free time
trying to maintain
his own list of Web cams
(http://www.eskimo.com/~irving/web-voyeur/)
, and can be reached via
e-mail at
irving@eskimo.com