World Within a World, Expanded

Matt (aka Stew) provide a bit more detail about our jpeg streaming that was discussed in our half-semester presentations:

Unity can not handle a stream of infinite length, and Anthony found the runtime class in Unity called WWW to facilitate our needs. He calls a function that returns an object, which can be applied as a texture to a plane. When we transition to the camera ‘feed’ in our experience, the script calls a URL that I have designated for him. The function that Anthony wrote refreshes this image as soon as it has downloaded the previous one, which simulates a live feed that runs at a few frames a second.

The camera is controlled via a set of computer gateway interface (CGI) commands provided by Panasonic. This set of instructions allows us to access the camera via a website, where the camera acts as the server. The camera has its local application files that translate the commands given by the website into the control language used to manipulate the pan, tilt, and zoom controls. My part of the workaround was to use the still camera functionality to capture an image of the designated resolution. 3-4 frames a second is not a video stream. But! We can get away with this because the camera will already be positioned on the child’s star before we transition to the live feed. The effect gives a ‘twinkle’ as the light subtly changes the RGB pixel values at this rate, furthering the imagined live stream.

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