TIL: You Can Access A User’s Camera with Just HTML
The capture
attribute is pretty nifty—and I just love that you get so much power in a declarative way:
<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="environment">
The capture
attribute is pretty nifty—and I just love that you get so much power in a declarative way:
<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="environment">
This is a truly wonderful web page! It’s an explanation from first principles of how cameras and lenses work.
At its most basic, it uses words which you can read in any browser. It also uses images so if your browser supports images, you get that enhancement. And it uses interactive JavaScript widgets so that you get that layer of richness if your browser supports the technology.
Then you realise that every post ever published on this personal site is equally in-depth and uses the same content-first progressive enhancement approach.
A beautiful post by Brendan, comparing the ease of publishing on the web to the original Flip camera:
Right now there’s a real renaissance of people getting back to blogging on their own sites again. If you’ve been putting it off, think about the beauty and simplicity of that red button, press it, and try and help make the web the place it was always meant to be.
A step-by-step guide to wrapping up a self-contained bit of functionality (a camera, in this case) into a web component.
Mind you, it would be nice if there were some thought given to fallbacks, like say:
<simple-camera>
<input type="file" accept="image/*">
</simple-camera>
Well now, this is a clever bit of hardware hacking.
Surfaces viewed from an angle tend to look shiny, and you can tell if a finger is touching the surface by checking if it’s touching its own reflection.
Peter looks into his crystal ball for 2018 and sees computers with eyes, computers with ears, and computers with brains.
Set aside some time: Craig is reviewing a camera again (and you remember how epic that was last time).
James walks the site of London’s old wall, documenting the instruments of London’s new wall.
He wrote about his experience in “All Cameras Are Police Cameras.” It is a history lesson, a present lesson, and a future lesson, all in one.
Kubrickian pictures taken by the Google robot wherein it captures its own reflection.
Craig recently had a piece published in the New Yorker called Goodbye, Cameras. It’s good …but this follow-on piece on his own site is truly wonderful.
Read. Absorb. Ponder.
Being close to the network does not mean being on Facebook, thought it can mean that, too. It does not mean pushing low-res images to Instagram, although there’s nothing wrong with that. What the network represents, in my mind, is a sort of ledger of humanity. The great shared mind. An image’s distance to it is the difference between contributing or not contributing to that shared ledger.
This is a pretty wacky experiment in altering font size based on the user’s distance from the screen (allow the page to access your camera and enable the “realtime” option for some real fun). I don’t know how much real-world application this has, but it’s a cute’n’fun exercise.
I’ve seen Heiko present with this gizmo at Mobilism and it worked a treat. I’m very tempted to get one for future presentations.
This is how London looked on my birthday, as recorded by the stationary meatspace protrusion of James’s Ship Adrift.
Oh, this is just wonderful: a camera that outputs a text description instead of an image (complete with instructions on how to build one yourself). I love it!
Accidental camera drops serve a purpose as part of a larger narrative.
Brendan’s latest product looks like it’ll be a thing of beauty. But he needs help getting it funded on Kickstarter. If you like taking pictures with your iPhone, I suggest you back this project.
Publishing photos from lost cameras.
This app might be just be so cool that it's worth getting an iPhone just to use it. "When you press the camera button, Buttons records the current time or location, then searches the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment or place."
"Nikon, the racist camera" (sing it to the tune of Flight of the Concords' "Albi, the racist dragon").
This is the dictionary definition of awesome: schoolkids send a camera into space.