TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML • Hacker News Board

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#71

Post by uneoneuno » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC

zikduruqe wrote: post #68

https://critter.camera

Have you used this before? This looks great - much lower overhead than what I was doing with a Pi, USB camera, and motionpi

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#72

Post by gofreddygo » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

merelysounds wrote: post #45

Waterluvian wrote: post #27

A lot of totally valid opinions out there about this, but I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications. For personal fun and learning, I'm making a complete 2D video game in ideally less than 1MB. It has 60fps graphics, full spatial audio, and gamepad support, all because the browser has a lot of these APIs that didn't exist when I was starting out my career.…

> I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications. Same. My latest project is a waveform generator for wavetable synthesizers [1]; there are visualizations, as well as handling audio (not real time but still). I was surprised that I could build that as a web app and achieve good UX and performance. [1]: https://merely.xyz/waves

I know nothing about this. It looks cool. I want to learn more. Where do I start ?

DDG search does not help much [1], [2]

Any pointers ?

1: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=waveform+generator+for+wavetable+s...

2: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wavetable+synthesizers&ia=web

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#73

Post by djbusby » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #27

A lot of totally valid opinions out there about this, but I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications. For personal fun and learning, I'm making a complete 2D video game in ideally less than 1MB. It has 60fps graphics, full spatial audio, and gamepad support, all because the browser has a lot of these APIs that didn't exist when I was starting out my career.…

Are you using A-Frame?

https://aframe.io/

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#74

Post by spicybright » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 5:08 PM UTC

hughes wrote: post #12

I feel like the default file input behavior is more user-friendly. Giving the user a choice between taking a new photo or uploading an existing one just seems way more flexible, and this is already how the file input works without the `capture` attribute.

Same. Phones have really good default native UIs for these "old" style input forms.

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#75

Post by spicybright » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 5:10 PM UTC

zikduruqe wrote: post #68

https://critter.camera

What an awesome idea! Was thinking of doing raspi craziness for capturing birds out my window.

Why do that when you can duct tape an old phone to the window lol

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#76

Post by rektide » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

Great seeing coherent cool capabiliites mase so east, taking & growing thr input element like this.

It does make me more than a bit sad how the web is bifurcating between mobile & desktop. We keep justifying it to ourselves, saying, yeah, that's not as important on desktop, and nit implementing. This pile of discrepancies built by non-implementations keeps growing though & it's not cool. Web Share & Web Share Target not being on desktop is another mobile only example, of more tech that's just good for PWA's in general/everywhere.

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#77

Post by osrec » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 5:12 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #27

A lot of totally valid opinions out there about this, but I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications. For personal fun and learning, I'm making a complete 2D video game in ideally less than 1MB. It has 60fps graphics, full spatial audio, and gamepad support, all because the browser has a lot of these APIs that didn't exist when I was starting out my career.…

Thanks for saying this, as I know a lot of people on HN have very negative feelings towards this trend. Personally, I feel the browser is a great way to stop reinventing the wheel, and the APIs abstract away a lot of the heavy lifting. They pretty much get you 80% of the way there, and the last 20% is where you can really add the stamp of "uniqueness" to your implementation.

The fact that the browser is also heavily sandboxed is another big benefit. I personally feel safer using a web app than a native app on any device, any day. You just don't know what a native app might be doing in the background, but with a web app, I feel things are much more transparent.

I can potentially see a future where you could deploy docker-like containers directly from the browser, while keeping the same fine grained controls that a browser allows. Then it really would make the web a truly flexible, infrastructure agnostic application delivery platform.

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#78

Post by onion2k » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

grumbel wrote: post #70

onion2k wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it incredible that people still think HTML, a spec first published in 1990 when we were using 386s with CGA monitors, shouldn't have evolved to utilise some of the modern features available on today's computers and phones. Why wouldn't we want to be able to do useful things on the web with our devices?

There is nothing wrong with HTML evolving, the problem is that it has evolved in the completely wrong direction. HTML should be a document language, yet it has barely improved in that in the last 20 years and is still missing really basic features (e.g. long-form document support). Instead it can talk to my Bluetooth devices and my camera. Something went very wrong in the evolution of HTML. It's nice that we have a p…

HTML should be a document language, yet it has barely improved in that in the last 20 years and is still missing really basic features (e.g. long-form document support).

I'm not sure what features you mean. Most things I can think of for long form content are right there in HTML.

Instead it can talk to my Bluetooth devices and my camera. Something went very wrong in the evolution of HTML.

That's not HTML though. That's not even really browsers and JavaScript. It's just Google and Chrome, and even then it's mainly there so it's available in ChromeOS more than the Chrome-the-browser. They just happen to share the same 'engine'. A random webpage is not hax0ring your bluetooth devices. They're very tightly coupled, so sometimes it's hard to see where one stops and the other begins, but Web Bluetooth has nothing to do with HTML. You only need look at the compatibility chart to see that - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#79

Post by johnfn » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #27

A lot of totally valid opinions out there about this, but I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications. For personal fun and learning, I'm making a complete 2D video game in ideally less than 1MB. It has 60fps graphics, full spatial audio, and gamepad support, all because the browser has a lot of these APIs that didn't exist when I was starting out my career.…

We're certainly veering off-topic, but I'd love to hear about which game engine you ended up using!

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#80

Post by j7j7j7j7 » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

Has been available for a long time.... I like https://meet.jit.si/ or zoom.com when I have to