Spy On Your Office

January 7, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 30 Comments

[Garagedeveloper] sent us his custom surveillance system, part 1, part 2, and part 3 after needing a way to find out why some cables at work were becoming unplugged (spoiler, the cleaners were messing up the wiring). At the base of the system is a web cam glued to a stepper motor. However, it gets much more in depth with a web front-end that allows the user to stream the feed and control the position of the stepper. We’re not particularly fond of how many different parts the project takes, while it all could be accomplished under C# with ASP.NET and parallel port library instead of including Arduino and excess code, but to each their own and the project turned out a success anyway.

Shadow Buttons

December 28, 2009 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

This art installation uses buttons made of light. A projector fills up the walls and ceiling of a room while a webcam monitors the pattern for changes. When the luminosity of a given area changes due to a shadow, a midi event is triggered. The software that controls the system is written in C# and uses the Emgu CV library to handle the image processing. In the video after the break you can see that creating shadows with your hands prompts changes in the image as well as the sound.

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Twittering Keylogger

July 1, 2009 by Zach Banks 16 Comments

[Kyle McDonald] sent in his latest project, a software keylogger that twitters what you type. He wrote it using C++ and OpenFrameworks. It logs each keystroke, then it posts to twitter 140 characters at a time. To protect himself, he set up a whitelist of private strings like passwords and credit card numbers that would be stripped before posting. If the twypewriter followed him, his keystrokes could be recreated.

[thanks Kyle]

IDisplay, Webcam Multitouch

June 26, 2009 by Eliot 32 Comments

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlLY0zic7u0%5D

Embedded above is an interesting multitouch demo by [Lahiru]. The goal of the project was to find an easy way to retrofit current LCDs for multitouch. Instead of using infrared or capacitive recognition, it uses a standard webcam mounted overhead. To calibrate, you draw polygon around the desktop screen as the webcam sees it. The camera can identify the location of markers placed on the screen and their color. iDisplay can also recognize hands making the pinch motion and sends these as touch events via TUIO, so it works with existing touch software. It’s written in C++ using OpenCV for image processing with openFrameworks as the application framework.

[via NUI Group]