A webcam is a video camera which is designed to record or stream to a computer or computer network. They are primarily used in video telephony , live streaming and social media , and security. Webcams can be built-in computer hardware or peripheral devices , and are commonly connected to a device using USB or wireless protocol.
Webcams have been used on the Internet as early as , and the first widespread commercial one became available in Early webcam usage on the Internet was primarily limited to stationary shots streamed to web sites. In the late s and early s, instant messaging clients added support for webcams, increasing their popularity in video conferencing. Computer manufacturers later started integrating webcams into laptop hardware. In , the COVID pandemic caused a shortage of webcams due to the increased number of people working from home.
First developed in , a webcam was pointed at the Trojan Room coffee pot in the Cambridge University Computer Science Department initially operating over a local network instead of the web. The camera was finally switched off on August 22, The final image captured by the camera can still be viewed at its homepage. The SGI Indy , released in , is the first commercial computer to have a standard video camera, [ 4 ] and the first SGI computer to have standard video inputs.
A fast machine is required to capture at either of these resolutions, though; an Indy with slower RPC CPU, for example, may require the input resolution to be reduced before storage or processing. The first widespread commercial webcam, the black-and-white QuickCam , entered the marketplace in , created by the U.
Jon Garber, the designer of the device, had wanted to call it the "Mac-camera", but was overruled by Connectix's marketing department; a version with a PC-compatible parallel port and software for Microsoft Windows was launched in October The original Quick Cam provided xpixel resolution with a grayscale depth of 16 shades at 60 frames per second, or shades at 15 frames per second.
