IDEA No 34
WEBCAM
The first use of a webcam was not for human communication but simply to see if the coffee had all gone.
Justin Kan, whose attempt to broadcast his entire life at Justin.tv popularized the term ‘lifecasting’.
It all started back in 1991 at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory. Hard-working students faced a perilous situation on a daily basis. Could they make it to the coffee pot before all the coffee was gone?
Quentin Stafford-Fraser worked in the Trojan Room. The coffee pot lived in the hallway just outside. He set up a camera facing the pot and ran wires under the floor to his computer. His friend Paul Jardetzky wrote a program that captured images of the pot every 30 seconds. No longer would Quentin and Paul and their fellow students make the journey to the coffee pot in vain. Two years later, in November 1993, students Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson adapted the program so the coffee pot could be seen via a standard Web browser. The Trojan Room coffee pot became an international sensation overnight.
The first commercial webcam was introduced in 1994 by the US company Connectix. Only available for Apple Macintosh computers, the QuickCam was expensive and the image quality poor. Crucially, other than a variably full coffee pot, there was not much to look at.
As with many Web technologies, interest was eventually fuelled by a seminaked woman (see Pornography). In 1996, Jennifer Rigley switched on JenniCam, an uncensored window to her bedroom. At her peak, Jenni was receiving 4 million visits a day. A flurry of webcam girls followed. Ten years later, Justin Kan took this to its logical conclusion, launching Justin.tv, a 24x7 webcast of his daily life from a head-mounted camera.
Today, webcams are an integral piece of our Web-browsing experience. Applications like Skype are the communication tools of choice for many. Augmented-reality applications use them to enhance the physical world. We even use them to see what our pets get up to when we’re at work.
As the Web and the physical world converge, the role of the webcam becomes more central to our online experience, so much so that the next generation of webcams are likely to be wearable. Popularized by Google Glass, soon lifecasting will be just life.■
‘Who’d have predicted that the first Web celebrity would be a coffee pot?’
Images from the Cambridge students’ Coffee Cam.