iSight tricks

June 1, 2006 12:45 PM

What are your favorite iSight tricks?

I just came into an iSight camera. iChatAV is pretty slick, and I have mucked around with a couple of screensavers as well as the games that do rudimentary motion tracking. But I want some serious whizbang - Like have it track my head moments as a mouse controller, or some whacked out live video processing. What's the absolute coolest thing you've seen done with a camera attached to a mac?

posted by mzurer to technology (8 comments total)

People have used iSights with Cycling74's Jitter libraries with Max/MSP to do realtime audio and video processing.
posted by Mr. Six at 12:51 PM on June 1, 2006

I've had hours of fun playing with the warping effects in Photo Booth on my iMac at work. I'd post an example if I was still there.

Other than that, I like Delicious Monster's iSight integration a lot - using it to scan the barcodes of your books, CDs, games and DVDs to make a virtual library.

There's a lovely little Flash 8 fire applet that, when you grant it permission to use your iSight (and make sure it's selected in Flash player's options), will make anything that moves in frame seem to be on fire.
posted by armoured-ant at 12:53 PM on June 1, 2006

Personally, with the old firewire isights and a powerbook, I've done whole-house tours with friends far away, by just walking through the house with the camera pointed ahead and describing what they are seeing. Few of my family and friends have made the trek out here to see everything, but several of them have gotten the grand tour online.
posted by mathowie at 1:53 PM on June 1, 2006

If it's not one of the fixed iSights (e.g., in the iMac), point it behind the computer. Write an Applescript that takes periodic pictures, then use them as the desktop for a see-through Mac effect.

In a similar vein, point it over your shoulder. Open an app (iChat, iMovie, whatever) and feed the iSight input into the app. Instant rearview mirror.
posted by forrest at 2:10 PM on June 1, 2006

Be sure to check out iGlasses. I found it made such a difference in the quality of my iSight images that I found myself forced to fork over the shareware fee pretty much right away. It also has a lot of useful special modes such as night-vision, rotation, etc.
posted by kindall at 2:30 PM on June 1, 2006

Oh, here's another fun one: ChatFX.
posted by kindall at 3:04 PM on June 1, 2006

If anyone has an interest in access the iSight via Cocoa and then manipulating the images via CoreImage/CoreVideo check out: http://toxicsoftware.com/blog/index.php?s=SequenceGrabber (Blantant self link). I have written a Cocoa framework for Mac OS X that makes accessing the iSight relatively simple.
posted by schwa at 4:23 PM on June 1, 2006

play with a rotating cube(hint, push spacebar to toggle video)
posted by KimG at 4:40 AM on June 4, 2006