The webcam of a computer device can be a very useful piece of hardware. Weโve written an โentry levelโ web application using your deviceโs webcam, should it have one, and should you give permission for the web application to access it, and if the web browser and platform combination you use suits some or all of the functionality offered in this first draft. We would like to thank three great online resources for the code stitched together for this first draft web application, those being โฆ
- www.kirupa.com link taught us about the getUserMedia method of the navigator object โฆ
- software.intel.com link helped us with code and event logic allowing for a 33mS refresh of the webcamโs underlying video to an HTML(5) canvas element, along with a greyscale manipulation of that canvas elementโs โsnapshot in timeโ contents
- developer.mozilla.org link helped us with some other image within canvas pixel level functionalities such as colour reversal, and zooming in ((like a magnifier) as you see often on eCommerce product pages) and an individual canvas pixel rgba(r,g,b,opacity) report
None of this functionality calls on anything else but HTML(5) and Javascript โsmartsโ, and is eye opening in that way, no doubt.
And so todayโs first draft is mainly about the webcam (hardware) โcaptureโ capabilities, its โconduitโ to the outside world โฆ that being you user gals and guys โฆ say hello โฆ is that curious and exciting notion that you capture the webcam video streaming โsnapshotโ fast enough into a canvas element, it looks like you are just dealing with a โmagicalโ canvas, though the (usually green) webcam light on your device (and the web browser tab (usually red) light, and any other web browser webcam icons shown) should be the giveaway that a webcam underpins the goings on.
There are cross-platform and cross-browser issues with webcams, that is for sure. Maybe youโve gone and clicked the liverun equivalent of clicking the tutorialโs picture, already, above, and noticed a slightly different pattern of arrangement to our usual. We direct you to an https: URL, because the Google Chrome web browser asks for this type of URL to go with allowing permission to access the deviceโs webcam.
And so that leaves us to show you the HTML and Javascript code weโve got those three links above to thank for, mainly. The code can be downloaded and/or perused via the webcamtesthtml (https:) source code link. We also direct you to a video we made for you to visualize all this, below โฆ
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