Wireless Webcam

Wireless Webcam technology has made it possible to send and receive video images throughout the internet. The new innovations combined with high speed internet access have contributed to its rapid growth. Used for traffic surveillance, intruder alerts, bank security, child protection, video conferencing, video e-mail, weather watching, nature observation, and curiosity—Wireless Webcam is at many locations!

Interesting, Wireless Webcam are fun—at least for the first 10 minutes or so. After that your viewing audience begins to suffer from dull, comatose images generated by a cheesy, single focal-length lens tethered to a host computer that's usually residing in the dusty recesses of your office. So, unless you have a window to a really great view, we doubt that you're going to win too many Emmys for your online broadcasts.

But, on the other hand, what if you could roam freely with a portable Wireless Webcam outfitted with a powerful zoom lens that could follow the action as it happens? Your high-resolution images would be processed quickly and directly uploaded to a web server for immediate viewing. Now, that would be a Wireless Webcam worth watching, wouldn't it?

Wireless Webcam process involves video streaming—a flow of still digital pictures snapped by a simple camera. The camera can be digital or analog. Analog cameras are like the traditional 8mm and VHS camcorders and are connected to a video card on a computer. That computer can upload the video stream to the internet if connected via phone modem or direct connection.

Digital and Wireless Webcam are a recent innovation.... webcasting from their own embedded webserver and webpage with a direct connection to the internet (the system currently in place in the Communications Lab at the time of writing this article). When the Wireless Webcam sends its stream of images to a server, the server holds a cache of images that are constantly updated. The webpage that web casts the images contains an html code that identifies the source of the image, quality settings and size of the image to be displayed on the page.

When a user's browser logs on, the stream of images are displayed within the window. The refresh rate determines the lag time between new images being displayed. This can range from one refresh every 90 seconds, for example, to near video quality streaming. This capability is determined by the speed of the connection (known as bandwidth), the processing speed of all computers involved, the version of the network browser, the chosen picture size, detail of the image, and network traffic. Any computer with a speed of 300 MHz and above can display streaming video using Wireless Webcam. Image quality is controlled through the level of compression; where high compression produces small files while low compression displays high image quality and larger files.

A typical line of html code on the webpage appears like this, with 10.6.9.185 indicating the address of the camera and the numbers 240 and 320 specifying the size of the image to be displayed.

On the other hand, if you own a laptop, and have been experimenting with 802.11b networking, you're already close to a portable, high-quality solution using Wireless Webcam. With the right software, a little ingenuity, and a DV (Digital Video) camcorder, you can build a robust broadcasting system that will publish images actually worth watching.

Wireless Webcam consists of a digital camera attached to your computer. Cameras like these have dropped well below $100 and they are easy to connect through a USB port (earlier cameras connected through a dedicated card or the parallel port). A piece of software connects to the camera and grabs a frame from it periodically. For example, the software might grab a still image from the camera once every 30 seconds. The software then turns that image into a normal JPG file and uploads it to your Web server. The JPG image can be placed on any Web page. If you don't have a Web server, several companies (like the makers of Webcam32) now offer you a free place to upload your images, saving you the trouble of having to set up and maintain a Web server or a hosted Web site.