Karlin Lillington
With their fleeting views of people, objects and places dispersed across the globe, webcams are the condensed essence of the World Wide Web. Ranging from the raunchy to the silly to the sublime, they bring quick glimpses of elsewhere to our computer screens, making it possible to download another life or have it streamed right to us. They spur many of us to willingly violate our own privacy as we broadcast ourselves to unknown desktops.
And they compel people to watch things purely for the sake of watching. Embarrassing things: things you never care about in the real world – a day in the life of a refrigerator; the activity in a cat litter pan; the front of the Twin Pond Motel in Farmington, Maine; the construction of the Millennium Dome. And, of course, various sexual activities, some of which you must pay to see, but a surprising number of which are broadcast for free by people who think global when they think exhibitionism.
All this is available to Web viewers because, about three minutes after the invention of the Web, someone realised you could attach a video camera to a computer and show things, live.
While the porn industry was quick to understand the value of this great leap forward for personal technology, most people simply enjoyed the novelty value of viewing odd things like the famous coffee pot in the computer laboratory at the University of Cambridge. One of the first internationally known webcams, the pot – and its history – are still there at . Initially, beaming the pot out to the world was a technical feat restricted to the upper ranks of geekdom – someone had to cobble together computer programs that would link the bits of equipment and then send out the images through a server.
Now, anyone with a modicum of computer knowledge can purchase a commercial webcam set-up, or assemble the hardware and download, free, the software needed to get a basic site up and running. Other webcam enthusiasts are happy to explain, step-by- step, how to do it yourself:
Try Sam’s Web Cam Cookbook at for friendly advice on everything from basic systems to mounting a webcam on a bicycle. You can get the software at Cam Central, .
Of course, the wide availability of webcam ingredients has led to an explosion of webcam sites on which almost anything can be watched almost anywhere at almost any time of the day. For a sampler of the sheer volume of webcam sites, try Cammunity, Cam Central, or I-Spy. Alternatively, search for “webcams” on Yahoo! for a long list of sites.
A perennial webcam favourite is the basic window-on-the-world set-up – a camera mounted to offer a view of a particular place on the globe. At the macro end of the scale are satellite views of Earth, but more typically, viewers are offered a live view of a city skyline, a downtown landmark, or a panoramic shot from a camera mounted on a tall building. You can tour the world via webcam using sites like the worldcam compendium at AT&T Labs in Cambridge, England, . Nasa also keeps a range of webcams running, including some on satellites, one in mission control, and one on the space shuttle. Try for a site that attractively consolidates the Nasa cams.
The Discovery Channel in the United States provides links to a set of science-oriented webcams, including animal cams on sharks, naked mole rats, bats and other creatures that children in particular will like. Or for a sometimes quirkily entertaining view of the behaviour of humans, try for a live view from a New York cab.
Dueling GeekCams lets you look at the activities of two geek friends as they sit at their computers. Not exciting enough? Then visit Roscoe the cat at Litterpan Alley, though most likely you’ll get Roscoe’s cat litter pan without Roscoe actually in it. And for the grand finale, you can see how far the Millennium Dome has progressed at the BBC’s Dome Cam.
And if you’ve wondered why nearly all webcams send single images that get updated at regular intervals rather than a continuous stream of video, there are two reasons. First, it’s far more difficult to set up a webcam that streams video to a server. And second, most modems still send and receive data at a rate which is too sluggish for video. But with high-capacity networks not too far away, expect webcams to provide ever more active windows on to odd, intriguing – and sometimes, just plain boring – corners of Net life.
ENDS
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