Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Old Webcams? 258
An anonymous reader writes "I work as an IT administrator at a school. We have just upgraded our entire webcam inventory (about 45 webcams, model Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX) and have all the old ones sitting around. I would like to know what a neat project would be to make use of all the old ones. I was figuring there would be an open project somewhere that involved mass amounts of webcams."
Get permission first (Score:3, Interesting)
Multi-touch cabinet (Score:3, Interesting)
Yo (Score:1, Interesting)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1840224/throwable-36-camera-ball-takes-spherical-panoramas [slashdot.org]
Bullet time! (Score:5, Interesting)
Get some USB hubs and make your own bullet-time setup.
True RNG (Score:3, Interesting)
Cheap CCD + Rad source from smoke detector == true RNG. If nothing else, some of the advanced physics or math classes in the district might be interested in the project.
Real suggestions (Score:4, Interesting)
Webcams can be used for all sorts of data acquisition purposes, if you have some spare computers.
For instance, take a plastic egg-carton and grow 12 plants using different media (ex - a range of PH across the bays). Use a webcam to monitor the plants, and count the green pixels day-by-day to measure the relative growth rates.
Make a brush pile on school grounds and bury the web cam *within* the pile. Take an image 1/sec, and also monitor temperature. Throw out images which are the same as previous images. Use the data to watch how critters survive within brush piles, and how much insulation being in a brush pile affords.
Train a camera on the sky and take pictures over time. Count the white/blue ratio to monitor cloudiness/overcast.
Camera Array for fast imaging or Lightfield Camera (Score:4, Interesting)
Build a camera array similar to what Stanford has done (see http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/ [stanford.edu] ) for fast imaging, or building a camera array to refocus images after the fact (see http://lightfield.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu] ).
Otherwise, you could do your own "bullet-time" live spin-around imaging system by placing them around a circular room.
Contest (Score:5, Interesting)
Contest:
Have all the students submit ideas, then let them vote on which project to do.
I'm guessing 50 school kids can come up with some pretty unique ideas.