Top 10 Geeky Things You Can Do With a Webcam

The multimedia aspect of computing has taken off like never before. People are now communicating visually over the internet. Webcams play an important role in this whole thing. There are so many things you can do with a webcam or camera hooked up to your computer. You might have used a webcam for video calls or occasionally as a mirror to arrange your hair, but there’s a lot more you could do with your webcam just by installing some free software.

Most webcams range anywhere from around $50 to up to $100. They really are everywhere. So, what can you use you webcam for? Let’s take a look. Here are top ten cool things you may not know you can do with your webcam.

1. Home/Office Security Surveillance System:

Sometimes you may want to be able to monitor your office or home when you are not there. When it comes to monitoring, you will find that there are many more expensive webcam options available. The difference between those more expensive webcams and the smaller ones is that the larger webcams usually have a web server built into them, thus making the webcam is internet-enabled with it’s own IP address. Once connected to your network, you can directly access the webcam and view what it sees over the internet.

How to Turn Your Webcam into a Motion-Sensing Security Camera?

However, you don’t need an expensive, server-enabled webcam to do home or office monitoring. You can use one of the cheaper, USB cameras and use your own computer as the server. To acieve this, there are plenty of free programs you can use to turn a webcam into a remote security system. Simply install Yawcam (Windows only) or Vitamin D (Windows and MAC).

Both are free and once installed, you can configure them to live stream video and monitor the feed remotely. The software can also be set to alert you or start recording when motion is detected in the frame of view. For general surveillance, you can setup the software to take snapshots at set intervals and upload them to a remote FTP server. Linux users can get the motion-sensing goods with the open-source app Motion.

2. Login to Windows with Your Face

Some computers may have this feature built in, but if you have a PC running Windows and a webcam, you can enable login via face recognition easily.  Freeware application LemonScreen adds face recognition to your Windows login screen, allowing you to login to your locked PC by simply sitting down in front of your computer.

In the initial configuration register your face with the software and set an auto-lock for Windows. Once active, the software will recognize your face and automatically log you in to Windows without the need for a password.

Since the software recognizes certain points on your face, it doesn’t matter if you have a different hairstyle or if you’re wearing spectacles one day.

There is an easy way to break in though – if anyone just holds up a photo of yours to the webcam, the software may log in because it can’t recognize 2D or 3D shapes. But hey, its fun!

3. Optical Character Recognition

OCR or optical character recognition using a webcam is a bit tricky as the image quality of most webcams is average. But you can take an image using the webcam and then use software like Microsoft Document imaging, Google Docs and Abbyy FineReader Online to convert images to text.

You can also try Evernote (free to use). Evernote is recommended software for OCR since it reads the image from the webcam and converts it into searchable text in real-time.

4. Video Email

Video email is not something that is quite there. Sure, you can probably email video file attachments around, but that is tedious. Fortunately, if you take the whole traditional email thing out of the equation and make it all web-based, it gets easier. Enter Eyejot.

Eyejot is a free video mail service. You set up an account and you can send video messages back and forth with people. It interfaces with your webcam using the Flash plug-in, just like Ustream.

The only hitch to this whole thing is that one has to log into their Eyejot profile in order to view messages. You will, however, get an email notification of a new Eyejot message so you’re not left guessing.

5. Create Awesome Time Lapse Videos

Time lapse is a photography technique wherein multiple photographs, taken at the same location over a period of time are stitched together to form a video. The resulting effect is of time passing by very quickly, hence the name. Free software called Tilaphos or Webcam TimerShot can do this for you without hassling you with too many technical details.

An external webcam is recommended for time lapse videos because it is easier to keep it still. Also, it is much easier to place it at a location from where a wider frame can be captured – larger coverage would result in capturing of more movements, which in turn will make the video look good.

It’s important that the laptop (or webcam) is kept perfectly still and that it receives constant power. After that, it’s just a matter of setting the time interval and recording the time lapse.