Minnesota Daily
January, 1998

LOOK! ANA BROUGHT A BOY HOME

A few years ago, while the fledgling Web was still cracking from its shell, crude but affordable internet cameras appeared on the market. Intended for cheap video conferencing, code kids soon came up with their own use -- webcams. Technology's not yet at the point where a camera can feed fully live video to the Web, so instead they upload a single frame every so often -- generally 1-3 minutes. The coolest thing about the webcam phenomenon is its pervasiveness: pictures filter in from nations and subcultures across the world, and the technology isn't limited to huge corporate sites. Anybody with a digital camera and the necessary software can set up their own webcam site. These sites aren't limited to exotica, either; hundreds of sites around the world feature webcam images of everyday life -- neighborhoods, skylines, backyards and so on. Locally, one of the best sites for weather and skylines is WCCO's Channel 4000 (wcco.com/marketplace/skyview.html), whose centerpiece is a hotel rooftop shot of downtown Minneapolis.

But many webcam sites focus on subjects that are goofy, if not totally useless. For instance, CoffeeCam (menet.umn.edu/coffeecam) -- a camera keeps watch over a percolator in the Mechanical Engineering department here at the University. You'll be happy to hear their Chia Professor has been replanted and may be viewed as well. If Chia sites don't float your boat, you can look through a telescope at the UC-Santa Barbara web site (deepspace.ucsb.edu), or check out live video feeds from NASA (nasa.gov). Anything's fair game: aquariums, lava lamps, rubber band balls, toilets, model railroads ... some subjects are interesting; a lot of stuff isn't. The strangest sites of all belong to those few bold individuals who have set up cams to snap every moment of their lives. One of the first was Jenni, an art student with a cam in her dorm room at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Now she's collected a huge following and a for-profit website (jennicam.org) which charges $15 per year to view her bedroom.

Since Jenni, many more people have followed suit, though some sites fascinate more than others. These sites take on the flavor of a soap opera, with images of beautiful people in beautiful surroundings -- after all, who wants to spy on someone with a boring and unglamorous life? A case in point: The webcam empress-for-life has to be Ana Voog (anacam.com), a Minneapolis musician and performance artist who has set up five cams in her apartment to record her life. Watch Ana paint Xs on her body. Watch her watch TV. Watch her stare into space. Watch her bathe (YES!). The self-styled "faerie queene" of the Web, Ana (whose real name is Rachel Olson) sang with The Blue Up? for 11 years before starting out on her own. Her web site is a captivating, contradictory blend of style and substance; Ana is a bottle-blonde who collects mannequins, globes and guns, and sells mugs with her face on them. What more could you ask for?

It's really not difficult to set up your own webcam. One of the most affordable cams on the market right now is the Color QuickCam from Connectix, retailing around $200. Shareware software such as Webcam 32 (downloadable from kolban.com) can be registered for $25. The real expense, though, comes from the modem line. Unless you plan on dialing into the internet every time the camera snaps a picture, you'll need to have a dedicated ISDN line, which is much more expensive than a regular line. That's why most webcams are in labs, offices and other locations that are already wired for ISDN. The same technology that gives us images of some bozo's fish tank can also be used to connect more useful gadgets to the Web. Highway sensors in the Twin Cities metropolitan area measure traffic congestion, feeding data to a website (traffic.connects.com). Sections of road where traffic travels at less than 50 mph are highlighted: an obvious benefit to those of us who commute by highway. Not all of these sites are worth the effort spent to maintain them. Who really cares about the temperature of Paul Haas' refrigerator (hamjudo.com) or what CD is playing at the computer science lab at Notre Dame (cse.nd.nd.eu/~jsquyres/cdinfo)? But gosh darn it, stuff like this is fun! And you can't help but imagine a future of webcams: cams in every restaurant so you can see if there's a table open, cams on highways to check on the traffic, cams in schools to make sure the kids aren't smoking weed ... damn it, I'm losing my buzz. Webcams are a weird, strangely compelling mix of exhibitionism, voyeurism and art. With such a haphazard, chaotic development as webcams, there's no real way to predict its outcome. There will be those who abuse the technology, those who hate it and those who ignore it. Just like every machine ever made.

---By John Baichtal