Webcam Scanner Camera

This program turns your webcam into a scanner camera, similar to the ones used to record photo finishes, but much, much, much slower. With it, you can create images like the ones on this page with ease and with no digital manipulation! It works by taking one pixel line at a time and arranging those slices in a line to produce the image. Thus one dimension of the image is spacial, and the other is temporal.

DOWNLOAD

Webcam Scanner Camera is freely available - and now have been tested on - for Windows XP/Vista/Win 7, Mac OS X and Linux.

All downloads include binaries and Processing source code (which is 100% Java), so you can compile and run it yourself. Windows version uses JMyron for video input, Linux version uses GSVideo/GStreamer, Mac OS X version uses Processing Video components.

USAGE

Press arrow buttons to start "scanning" in that direction. That is, if you press the down arrow, the webcam will start taking horizontal slices and stack them downwards, etc.
Press Enter to change camera resolution mode(pre-configured settings are 320 x 240, 640 x 480, 160 x 120).
Press Space or arrow button to re-start the current scan.
Click anywhere to modify webcam settings.
Each time a scan is completed, the picture is saved to a file "scan_photo_####.jpg" in the program directory, where #### is the shot number.

This will get you pictures like the one in the header and footer sections if you move past the camera. You can also take panoramic pictures by rotating your camera (or laptop):

ADVANCED USAGE

Edit the settings.xml file in the program directory to add more webcam resolutions or to change the photo length (in horizontal scan) or height (in vertical scan). Note that due to the jello effect, the horizontal scan mode might exhibit additional weirdness.

KNOWN BUGS

Input selection is not yet available;
On Mac OS X and Linux, changing camera resolution is not possible when the program is running (that is, you only have one resolution mode);
Running program after the system returns from hibernation might crash Ubuntu.