You want the users of your web app to be able to use their webcam to take their own profile shots and you’d like them to be able to personalize or stylize the picture before uploading it your weberver. Or maybe you’ve seen one of those fun photobooth-type apps that takes photos, applies cool image effects to them and lets you share them… wondering how they worked.
Imagine if your HTML5 app could programmatically access your webcam, take snapshots and modify the image data procedurally. You could then let your user’s upload or share their self portraits.
In this article, I’m going to teach you how to do that and more. Building on some articles that I’ve shared in the past, I’ll walk you through a sample application that displays the video from your webcam, applies image processing effects to that video, lets you take still snapshots of the filtered video and lets you serialize the snapshots so that they can be uploaded to a web server.