2. There was one webcam in 2005, but for halloween 2006, there will be three!
3. Some sort of text based light board where you can enter the text. I got this clever idea from these guys where they have a webcam pointing at a computer screen, and you can enter some text and it is displayed. Would be really cool if I could have some sort of alphanumeric text board that I could feed data too. Ended up having a laptop visible on webcam3 (Haunted Office Cam) and web surfers could do "Instant Message via webcam" - was a ton of fun - see the halloween messages.
4. Possible new bells & whistles with Webcam and Webcontrol. The Webcam and WebControl (which allowed folks to not only view the lights in real-time, but also turn them ON and OFF) is a big hit, so I'm always curious to see what technologies come my way this year to see how they can be used.
5. Streaming video on webcam. Related to point #4 above, I'd love to do streaming video rather than refreshed JPEG's. Last year a meta-refresh was used which caused a "blink" in the image - this year, Javascript makes for smoother updates.
6. Display which countries Halloween 2006 web surfers are coming from.
Since I have the geolocation stuff working, it would be fairly simple to
generate a percentage breakdown by country of where surfers are coming from.
I thought about this in the past, but in late September, a neighbor
suggested this also ... so I ended up doing a Google Map implementation -
check out all the pumpkins on the Halloween Maps! ;-)
I'll be putting up my halloween decorations in late September, so check back then to
where you can view and control 'em via the
halloween webcam - halloween 2006 will be even better!
Update #1: They are up!
Update #2: Worked pretty darn well and was a ton of fun! Will be building on these concepts for christmas 2006 and also see what is planned for halloween 2007.