When initially thinking about constructing a web camera that records an architectural space, I began thinking about issues surrounding surveillance. One of the things that has struck me as being very odd about the concept of the public being watched all the time through video cameras, other then the obvious violation of privacy, is who actually sits there and watches these things and how boring a job it must be in most circumstances. However, while I cannot imagine anything more frightening then the knowledge that someone in a position of power is watchng and recording my every move, I have recently realized that there are circumstances when survelliance is not only necesssary but actually somewhat interesting. The school where my daughter goes, she's three so in all seriousness I'm speaking of day care, has just announced that they are planning on installing what is effectively web cameras in all of their classrooms so parents can watch their children online every minute they are in school. I have heard of this being done in other schools as well. Now I am by no means the type of parent who would monitor my child's every move online durring the day, such a task would be tedious and obsessive quite frankly. But it did get me thinking as to what kind of surveillance might be important or interesting to me and how it could be implemented so it is more then simply a continous feed of video.

In thinking about these concepts, my initial idea was to create a 24 hour web camera for surveliance of my daugher's bedroom. I have a tendency not to hear my child wake up these days, and she has a tendency to surprise me either by waking up at 3am to watch Dora the Explorer on DVD or by performing an "organizing" exercise of all her worldly possessions at 6am while I am about an hour and a half away from being awake. I thought it would be interesting to capture the daily and nightly state of her room that would not only provide me with a clue of what is actually going on in there but would also be visually interesting.

In order to accomplish this the camera would run continuosly with live video feed into the left window of the java application. Then the application would freeze frame an image every five minutes or every half hour into the right window of the application. Ideally the images would be uploaded to either my or the stage server and be displayed sequencially on a web page. Unfortunately, I am only currently learning perl and database stuff and have no knowledge of PHP so I planned only to save the images to my C drive and then organize them in a kind of slide show that would represent a day and night in the life of my daughter's room.