Experiments and demos involving webcams and Flash
I cobbled this Webcam effect together for no other reason than creative curiosity – a digital hall of mirrors thing, I suppose. Best viewed on your laptop, since it requires Flash and a Webcam…
And for the techies, here’s the source code (zipped FLA).
I started trying to find useful things to do with face detection, but with limited success. I tried using the Libspark Haar Cascades implementation of face detection with Papervision3D to create a sort of head tracking effect, but it’s a little flaky – partly because of poor tracking accuracy and partly because it’s too CPU intensive. You can view it on its own page here.
Playing around some more with my webcam, I cooked up this 3D Earth with Papervision and made it controllable through a webcam (if you have one). The motion detection is rather flaky, since it tracks the centre-point of a whole area of motion – if you move a lot it will just get confused 🙂
I started playing around a little more with my Webcam and extended my previous motion detection example – this time to control the camera of a virtual 3-D space from motion detected in the user’s Webcam. It detects motion area and general direction, albeit with dubious accuracy, but you get the idea.
Due to popular demand, I’ve posted the source code for you lot to play with. It contains the FlashDevelop project file (it’s compiled with the Flex 3 SDK) and my cut-down 3-D engine, Pants3D 🙂
I played around some more with my webcam today and knocked this out. I also found my webcam already has the IR filter missing (cheap webcam), so it can already see infrared… which will come in handy: