6 ms·
WindowSwap: View someone's window somewhere in the world
- WenIllades 6y agoAll I get are static images in mobile devices. No video. :(
- WenIllades 6y agoAll I get are static images in mobile devices. No video.
- xeromal 6y agoThis thing makes me so happy.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> We need all the window views we can get. So, please send yours to qunaliaa@gmail.com. A 10-minute, horizontal HD video of your window and frame, with your name and location for credits. Horizontal, vertical, square, round or decorative, all kinds of windows are welcome! Oh, I guess it makes sense now that I think about it, but I really thought the views were live at first. Watching what I thought were live feeds felt super cool. :(
- dusted 6y agoAh, I also thought it was live and couldn't understand why they stopped after a while :)
- mirimir 6y agoHuh. I recall coming across a Tor onion site with links to various security cam systems. Nothing exciting, just live video of lobbies, elevators, parking lots and garages, etc.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoBack in the 90s a friend had modified his Realistic brand radio scanner to pick up cell phone frequencies. Nothing was encrypted back then. One of the calls we heard was of a computer generated voice repeating the phone number, the "internal temperature" and then a thirty second audio feed of what sounded like machinery. Every time I tried calling the number, it was the same thing though the temperature varied by a couple of degrees now and then. Never heard any voices or much variety in the machine noises. No idea what it was other than some local factory. The condo building I lived in during the 2000s had its server with all of the video cameras hacked. Probably the most exciting thing anyone could see was the fitness room with people exercising. We had no idea if anyone actually bothered watching the feeds or if it was just part of a botnet.
- mirimir 6y agoHuh. Remote equipment maintenance? Then there's this: https://gizmodo.com/these-secret-cold-war-radio-stations-are-still-broadcas-1648963330 https://gizmodo.com/these-secret-cold-war-radio-stations-are... It's strange when you come across those.
- joan_kode 6y agoAre you sure it wasn't just a plain old website? There was one posted here a few years ago (and I thought the site went down but it's actually still going): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13272112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13272112
- mirimir 6y agoI'm pretty sure that it was an onion site. But Insecam is amazing :)
- fart32 6y agoI have recently scanned addresses within a radius of my town and there's still a lot of cameras with default credentials or with no password at all. It's getting better over the years, but not quite.
- stinos 6y agoQuite a lot of Ultimaker 3D printers in there, that wasn't the case a couple of years ago. And factory floors/production lines in general. Remains fascinating, and awkward.
- DavidVoid 6y agoWith the right search words you can find plenty of those on https://www.shodan.io/ https://www.shodan.io/ edit: I found this one [1] just by searching for webcam. Seems to be from some factory. [1] https://i.imgur.com/WevJodh.png https://i.imgur.com/WevJodh.png
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThat’s a camera trained on a 3D printer, not from a factory. Quite popular with hobbyists to monitor the progress of prints.
- xingped 6y agoOh damn, I thought so too... :(
- AkelaA 6y agoYou might be interested in https://www.earthcam.com/ https://www.earthcam.com/ - they host a large selection of live webcams from different locations around the world, many at a pretty decent HD resolution and frame rate. Here's a live view of Midtown Manhattan for example: https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/midtown/skyline/?cam=midtown4k https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/midtown/skyline/?cam=mi... Or the Seattle Space Needle: https://www.earthcam.com/usa/washington/seattle/?cam=seattleskyline https://www.earthcam.com/usa/washington/seattle/?cam=seattle...
- dddw 6y agoLove that site, still feels like the old days of the Web to look at the huge list of webcams
- zachberger 6y agoI'm quite disappointed too. Wish you didn't have to go to the submit a window page to know its not live. I was ready to give access to my nest!
- hombre_fatal 6y agoPeople keep saying it's disappointing, but give it one minute of thought. Being prerecorded is the only reason it's interesting and has any content. Almost nobody is going to set up a dedicated webcam to constantly stream the interior of their window for some novelty website. And the few webcam streams you would see would be low quality, not capture anything interesting, accidentally capture the baby wailing, etc. But a 10min iPhone recording to capture the top 10min of their window in a day? That's a decent idea.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoIt does make sense, it just felt cooler when I thought it was live.
- jpeeler 6y agoI too thought it was live. Until I saw a sunset of a location one time zone away at 2 pm. And then one with rain in my current city with it being sunny presently. Since it's not live, maybe submissions should trim the part where they are adjusting the camera in the correct direction (not to be too critical). While it would certainly reduce the number of submissions to be live, this is hacker news. I'm sure there would still be a handful of interesting locations.
- richrichardsson 6y agoIf it was live it would just be a matter of time before a penis appeared on screen. :(
- a_imho 6y agoI will bite, why would anyone send their name and location to a random webservice? Taking the time to record and upload a 10 min hd video as well. What is the benefit?
- playpause 6y agoEnjoying the idea, trusting that it’s intended in good faith as an art project or similar, and wanting to participate.
- tetris11 6y agoYou can also give a fake name and a very loose location
- andrepd 6y agoThe name is for credit, I assume you can give a fake handle or no name at all. As for the location, again I assume you don't need to send your full address if you don't want to. City will probably suffice.
- mkl 6y agoSome are much shorter than 10 minutes. I saw one in Shanghai (IIRC) that was 10-20 seconds. Some of them are in locations that are easily identifiable by landmark buildings, which seems a bit scary/creepy.
- huhtenberg 6y agoAll I get are static images. No videos at all.
- jansan 6y agoLet's think this through. Imagine you are a super evil criminal, who is just looking for an opportunity to commit a crime. Now you see a video that allows you to identify the house from which it was recorded. So you know there is probably a person who visits HN and who recorded a video from his desk. Now what? How can you possibly use this information in a bad way?
- martin-adams 6y agoI was quite relieved to realise they weren't live. That means you can watch it in peace knowing that the service won't be abused and someone has reviewed the footage. Great idea, strangely calming.
- terrycody 6y agonot working on firefox, x-frame blocked...
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoHuh, I'm also on Firefox and it worked.
- gjsman-1000 6y agoNot working on Safari.
- tomcam 6y agoNot normally interested in novelty sites like this but I think it's absolutely wonderful. I live in a leafy Seattle suburb and am constantly smug about how lovely it is here. Most of these were at least as pretty.
- 65536 6y ago> I live in a leafy Seattle suburb and am constantly smug about how lovely it is here. Submit your window to the linked site, so others can enjoy it too if you didn’t already :)
- enjoy-your-stay 6y agoMy major takeaway from this: 1. Big cities are really boring! 2. Street level has more going on, but some people have to live with quite a lot of noise, higher up is quieter. 3. The world is a much windier place than I realised. Great idea though.
- keithnz 6y agocan you add a button to get a link to some of these so you can go back to them? for instance this is a nice sunset going on at the moment https://player.vimeo.com/video/431141355?autoplay=1&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&wmode=transparent&background=1&muted=0 https://player.vimeo.com/video/431141355?autoplay=1&title=0&... but had to go extract it out of the code
- keithnz 6y agooh, these aren't live, just recorded videos? even recorded, these are interesting.
- bhrgunatha 6y agoOn the point of buttons that "Open a new window somewhere in the world" button really needs moving to the bottom right corner. Despite being transparent it's blocking and spoiling the views.
- mkl 6y agoTry this in the JS console: $('#btn-window').setAttribute('style', 'left: 95%; right: 5%; transform: translate(-50%,0%);')
- mkl 6y agoThe following seems to do it: $('#vimeo-frame').getAttribute('src').match(/^(.*)\?/)[1]
- gotostatement 6y agoawesome work! we're gonna submit one tomorrow! it would be cool if you tagged the videos by time of day and showed daytime/nighttime ones based on the client's local time (or preference)
- blintz 6y agoThis is so relaxing to watch. I think the lack of a 'bookmark' function actually makes me linger on certain windows longer; I know that if I hit 'next' I probably won't be able to come back to that window.
- abiogenesis 6y agoThey are 10-minute recordings anyway, so you won't see anything new... That being said; there is a workaround until it gets implemented: Right click the video and select "Inspect". You will see the link to the Vimeo hosted video file.
- rykc 6y agoNot being familiar with London, this is probably a popular spot, but just watched The Old Guard on Netflix last night and noticed James Sandham's window and 1:48:12 in the movie are the same.
- Linkd 6y agoBeautiful project. I once had an idea to do some similar but with real time live camera feeds. And some sort of subscription/marketplace where people with amazing views would get paid to share their amazing views, and other folks would subscribe to that realtime 24/7 feed.
- reidjs 6y agoSome surfers use services like this to check if the wave conditions are right before they go out.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoA friend had a startup that did this for nightclubs so you could see which club was really going hot and which was dead. He got a couple of places to sign up but think ultimately it failed to gain traction because no nightclub wants potential customers to know ahead of time that it's dead inside.
- jmkd 6y agoYou could achieve this by selectively showing what it was like last Friday night at 1am instead of a live view at 8pm when nothing is happening but people are deciding...
- simcop2387 6y agoI've been streaming the birdfeeder on my balcony on youtube. mostly for fun and my mom. It makes a new stream every morning at 6am PST8PDT time, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0hyjYFftwe8vKnpERMS8ug https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0hyjYFftwe8vKnpERMS8ug The finches that visit mostly come around in the morning and before noon, with some around in the afternoon.
- harrisonjackson 6y agoNeat! What sort of camera setup do you have for this?
- simcop2387 6y agoIt's a raspberry pi with a logitech C920. The software is just some shell scripts + gstreamer to do the actual streaming. It goes to a server and then to youtube from there, so that I can have a much less laggy version of the video for my own use when positioning things or otherwise working on it.
- hijklmno 6y agoLoved it!
- hathym 6y agoI think that will work best if you display all the windows on a map and let the user select the location.
- raghava 6y agoThis is so neat! Thanks for this!
- freakynit 6y agoThis is so cool..
- k_ 6y agoNice! Too bad I didn't find a way to save/share a good one (some mountain landscape, etc.); maybe that's not the point?
- secondaryditto 6y agoFound someone who was playing Beatles in the background, half a world away, overnight in Dubai... (I know it's not live but it was still dark). Nice to have the sounds/ambiance as well as the video...
- ninju 6y agoThere another site that adds live radio to canned video https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/ https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/ Was here on HN a couple weeks back
- erikig 6y agoThis gave me such strong feelings of location nostalgia. Thanks for resharing.
- richsu-ca 6y agoLove this. Best internet idea in a long time. The pre-recorded video is key. I am recording one right now!
- T3RMINATED 6y agoits not realtime! just recordings. dumb
- acrophiliac 6y agoI would enjoy a "slideshow" or auto-advanced feature that automatically moves to the next window when the video finishes or after some fixed period of time.