This is a great demo by Paul Neave of the ‘getUserMedia’ feature of HTML5 which is gaining support in the more, ahem, modern browsers.

getUserMedia (or gum) allows an HTML5 web site to access to your camera and do funky stuff in JavaScript. Although it’s not fully supported across the tardier browsers there is a polyfill called gumShield which makes compatibility a little easier.

So grab your latest webkit (or Opera!) and play with the demo here

I’m really looking forward to some of the exciting stuff being done in Open Frameworks (http://www.openframeworks.cc) and groups such as Open NI (http://www.openni.org/) and NUI (http://nuigroup.com) moving towards supporting more web-based technology rather than the current trend of compiled, platform-specific codebases. Of course there is no question that compiled languages are the right choice for the process-intensive tasks commonly required by gesture tracking and live video processing. But very soon, HTML5 features such as direct access to the GPU via WebGL and the incredible runtime performance of Chrome’s JavaScript engine with Mozilla hot on their heels will allow this kind of fun directly in the browser. This will make these kind of interactive art pieces more easily share-able, broadcast-able and group-enabled than a desktop app will ever be.

Via netmagazine