4: Virtual Voyeurism -- The World of Webcams

Thanks to a device called a webcam, you can now use the Web to view live video images of people's pets, offices, living rooms, lava lamps, and more. Why you would want to view live video images of people's pets, offices, living rooms, lava lamps, and more is a question we won't get into here -- but it's reassuring to know you can.

In this chapter you can also read about a webcam that lets you see the world through its owner's eyes and a system that lets you plant seeds in a garden in Austria, tend them with a robotic arm, and check on them with a video camera. Ah! Back to Nature.

Trojan Room Coffee Pot

Let's hark back to 1991, to those rugged pioneer days when only certified computer nerds even knew what the World Wide Web was, never mind posting information on it. Back then, the lads at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory came up with the Trojan Room Coffee Pot viewing system ). This, then, was the prototype for future generations of webcams -- devices that allow you to view video from far-off and exciting locales while slumped in front of your computer screen.

There's also a detailed History of the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, written by Quentin Stafford-Fraser. We'll give you the decaf version here.

Like all students, the computer-science students at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab liked to work into the wee hours, fueling their efforts with numerous cups of mediocre coffee. Being impoverished academics, they had to share a single coffee machine, which was in the hall outside a computer lab called the Trojan Room. Rather than navigate a few flights of stairs to get a cup of coffee, only to be confronted with an empty pot, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky aimed a video camera at the coffee pot, connected the camera to a computer that could record frames of video, wrote a program that captured video images of the coffee pot every few seconds, and wrote another program that allowed each student to view the coffee-pot's status from his terminal. (In the twisted logic of computer scientists, completing the project just described is much easier than walking up and down stairs every now and then.)

The Trojan Room Coffee Pot cam was eventually converted to run on the Web; now, viewers around the world -- people with no access whatsoever to the coffee in question -- could, and did, check the coffee pot's level. Hooray for technology!

The Adams Family's Living Room Cam

If you've had your fill of coffee and are hankering for a little slice of Americana, you can look in on the Adams family's living room (no, not that Addams family). There you'll see the Adams family's couch, loveseat, and coffee table -- but rarely any Adams family members. Maybe they don't like hanging out in the living room because of that strange, nagging feeling that someone's watching them.