We have many webcams in CDG by now.

The first thing I did—a minor triumph in itself—was to display all of the streams of all of the webcams in a single web browser window. Instead of encoding these streams with a standard video codec (h264, vp8, etc), which would have introduced substantial latency into the system[0], the video is streamed as raw intensity maps over websockets. Here was the old interface:

It’s not a highly “designed” object yet, but I wanted to give a window into the past. Taking some ideas from an old prototype, I attempted a five-column strip, where you read left-to-right, past-to-present:

Actually, that’s how it’s laid out, but not how I read it. I read it right-to-left, present-to-past. I find it very “natural” to watch a moment dissipate over time. It’s soothing, as if we are coming to terms with our own mortality. By the time an image finally leaves the screen, I am ready for it to go.

Here’s a short video of the “zen surveillance” view (hi-res here). I am adjusting exposure settings, so there are more discrete actions than usual, but it’s helpful to understand what is happening. You can also see a little trace of a mysterious dangling rope.