Webcam fun with Flash
We are well on the way to putting together a prototype of a motion-controlled environment in Flash using the webcam. The thinking is to capture video from the webcam, and then periodically call a server backend that uses AForge.NET for image processing and AI, and then present data back to the Flash client that can then be used for UI interaction or something similar. draw.logic blog has a decent little rundown of webcam capture and simple motion detection using Actionscript, and Mr doob has a nice example of an arty 3D transform of webcam content. There are a few other examples out there, but no one really seems to have taken the bull by the horns and tried to harness the image content in real time to do something more useful. There are challenges of course, but the possibilities are exciting. If we can build even a simple feedback system that is robust and has adequate accuracy, the applications will surely follow.
