Control Your Computer With A Webcam

This is Tinkernut.com’s Video Cast. Thanks for watching. The video contest has now ended. I appreciate everybody that submitted a video. We had some pretty good submissions. We are going to go through those now and were going to announce the winner on Thursday. We are going to look for the videos that have the best originality and the best SpecialFX content and the winner will get a $75.00 Amazon.com Gift Certificate as well as a Software suite from Uniblue Systems worth over a $100.00. We are also going to do a runner up—second place if you will. They will also get a Software suite from Uniblue Systems which again is worth over a $100.00. That is pretty fantastic. Now to jump on another tangent, let me just say that over the past few years, video games have just become crazy, amazingly awesome. Not only video games but the video game controllers like this for instance, this is a Wii remote and with this, it’s like a magic wand, you can do almost anything with it to the screen. It’s incredible how these things work. But what I am going to show you in this video is how to take any object. This marker for instance, I am going to use this marker as a video game controller for my computer. What you will need is an object, anything, I am going to use this and computer with a webcam and some free software which I will show you right now. Open up a new Web Browser and you want to go to www.camspace.com. Here I am going to developers.camspace.com because it’s got more options but what you want to do is just download the CamSpace application to your computer and go ahead and install it. It does not have any spyware or anything like that, so you should just go through the automated installation process pretty quickly. And whenever it’s through, it’s going to automatically startup the program. I just click remind me later for the e-mail thing and canceled out at the automatic setup. So what I am going to do is just click the Select the Game option and as an example, I am going to choose the Bubbles game to show you what it’s like. Now, if you click on this little lock object icon, it’s going to tell you to hide the object that you want to use and then to show it. And once it shows it; once it tells you to show, it is kind of automatically detect the object you want to use. Now as you can see in this game, wherever I move this pen that I am using as the game controller object, that is where it’s going to move the game controller. If your webcam has kind of a slow frame rate and it’s kind of skippy, you may want to use it in a wider area or increase the amount of light in front your webcam. Now, I am going to show you a racing game that you can interact with, it’s called Ludo Race. Just do a Google search for that and you should—one of the results, the second result for me took me to this website and then at the bottom of the page, I clicked on the second link and now I am just going to download the game and it’s going to download it in a ZIP folder and what you want to do is just extract the game files. You don’t really want to start up the game yet; you just want to extract it and just remember where you extracted the files. So now what you want to do is go back to developers.camspace.com and click on the Game Controllers option. Then just scroll down until you get to the Ludo Race Game Controller and download it and select to Open With the CamTrax.camspace.file and now it’s going to have you show what object you want to use as the controller and once it’s selected, you’ll see that it has paused. And you can use this time to center the controller where you want it to be and click this Center Z Axis option and then click Launch the game while this is still paused. And then it’s going to have you navigate to where the ZIP file was and it’s going to start the game. Now what you want to—started the game and then hit the left hand Shift key and the Caps Lock to initiate the controller. This will unpause the controller and let you use the pen as the controller. Now you can see that I am using just the pen to navigate through this game which I am finding kind of difficult. It’s not really too easy to stir with a pen but if you find the case, you also find on the CamSpace website that you can download a printable stirring wheel to use for this game, so you may want to try that if a pen is not working for you. They also have other options like using this to control Google Earth and other applications like that. You can also download in Developers pocket so that you can use this to control not only games but the computer itself. You can actually use it as a mouse. So it’s kind of a lot a different possibilities. It is a lot of fun to play around with. So be sure to check it out and that’s it for this tutorial. For more go to tinkernut.com