ucanvcam - building virtual webcams
We are collaborating on an open-source free-software project called ucanvcam to help build virtual webcams or add special effects to a webcam stream. A tool based on this should be showing up on makesweet eventually. The basic idea is to make an API for doing webcam video stream manipulation in an OS-neutral way. Support is just Windows and Linux so far though, there’s nothing there for Macs yet. Anyway, ucanvcam should take care of all the messy OS details and leave users of the project free to create fun effects. We’ll be doing our bit to make this happen.
Related projects out there:
Update:
You can now download a binary release of ucanvcam. The release is a GUI for windows, and command-line for Linux. You can download and compile the source to get a GUI for Linux, but we don’t have a portable build for it yet.
Update (2):
Now the GUI is ready and downloadable for both Linux and Windows.
Are you interested in an open-source virtual webcam? If so, why? Leave us a note - the more information we have about interest in this the more we can justify contributing to the development on it.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Me, I just want a virtual webcam I can use on Linux. I got the binary version of ucanvcam going with the vloopback module- but is there a way change effects on the fly without having the GUI?
May 1st, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Dan, you’re best off compiling the GUI. If you really don’t want to, then you can communicate with ucanvcam using YARP if you choose the “ParamTV” effect - this is basically a dummy effect that waits for commands on the network. But to do this, you’ll need to figure out YARP :-).
May 17th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
I am very interested in this. I understand that it may be pure ‘fluff’ but it is software like this that makes using an OS more fun. It is especially needed with the youtube/myspace generation. I will not have a chance to use this for a couple of weeks, but I just wanted to stop by and state my interest.
Also, the flash plugin for Linux needs v4l2 support, I urge all Linux users to put pressure on adobe so that this may get implemented.
May 17th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Chuck, thanks for the encouragement!
September 27th, 2008 at 5:09 am
I’m interested in something like this for Linux, not only because it is fun - my cousin has a Logitech webcam that can do all kinds of cool effects over Skype like overlaying a mustache or glasses using face recognition - but could also be highly useful for real-time robot vision. Instead of complicated libraries with custom API’s, people could write effects that do face tracking or line detection that would easily work with any program, because it just provides a normal video feed as it’s output.