I heard about the possible Tsunami hitting Hawaii on Saturday about an hour before the predicted time. As any photographically inclined programmer would do I went searching for some WebCams. Once I found some that were returning images (most were timing out or saying too many users) I decided it would be neat if I could capture the images over time and throw them together into a video later.
About 15 minutes later and WebCamTracker was born. It’s nothing fancy, just a small Java class that’ll pull down a single image or multiple from the specified URL. To run it just use:
java WebCamTracker <webcam URL> <output directory> <?Max Duration?> <?Delay?>
Fortunately (but unfortunately for the video) the Tsunami didn’t really amount to much in Hawaii. The video does however show the surges so it’s still pretty neat. I ran WebCamTracker on 3 WebCams: Kanaha, Sprecks, & Hilo Bay. They turned out pretty sweet even if they don’t show much wave action. Pretty good for my first time-lapse, even if I didn’t actually take the pictures myself. Something I might play with soon though…
Anyway, Check it out:
side note: Music by JukeBox the Ghost, one of my favorite bands.
As another side note… watching this time-lapse just makes us want to go back.