Peter Griffin: Pandora's box for voyeurs and the merely curious

COMMENT

It was a stunt that would have taken a bit of planning. Someone had to find an inflatable dinosaur in bright pink. Then they had to descend into the crater at White Island and position the pink dinosaur in front of the web camera that delivers pictures of White Island to the internet and the world.

The result was a posting on the authoritative geek-website slashdot.org and probably a deluge of visits to GeoNet's volcano cam, the website streaming pictures of White Island with a little pink dinosaur in the foreground for all to see.

Web cameras are a great invention and they've become even more watchable as they improve in quality - thanks to higher-resolution cameras and the fact that healthy broadband connections are sitting behind most of them these days.

On the Geonet site, camera views updating on-the-hour views of our volcanoes are presented with more than just web-surfing voyeurs in mind. Volcanologists remotely monitor volcanic hotspots such as White Island, Ngauruhoe, Ruapehu and Taranaki, with the odd practical dinosaur joke no doubt tolerated.

Elsewhere on the web lies the path to thousands of other web cameras - a voyeur's Pandora's box, windows into the lives and habitats of others.

EarthCam, and Leonard's Camworld, are great places to start. They link to a vast collection of web cameras - covering well-known landmarks through to private webcams plotting the daily lives of those with nothing to hide.

Watch from the corner of 7th Ave and 47th Street, as people mill about Times Square. It's fast, updating every few seconds, and it lets you take control to tilt and rotate it.

A 24-hour time-lapse speeds up the day's camera feeds. Watch as the neon of the Hersheys and Morgan Stanley signs flicker through night and day.

A favourite in the office is the webcam watching the Panama Canal.

It's relaxing to watch the sun set over the canal as a giant tanker squeezes through the Miraflores locks.

Then there's scenes from Red Square in Moscow. An EarthCam camera is located on the roof of the Moscow Business World Bank (MDM-Bank) and takes in areas of Moscow that few outsiders' eyes would have laid sight on during the Cold War.

Now you can watch Moscovites mill alongside the Moscow river.

Underwater webcams are growing in popularity. There's the London Aquarium's eye on the critters held in its tanks. It's a smooth, rapidly updating feed, just don't go there at night. The lights are off and the sharks are asleep.

Try Monterey Bay Aquarium for shark cam, penguin cam and my favourite, otter cam.

We have our local share of webcams with ski-bunnies and surfies well catered for too.

There's SurfCams Bay of Plenty which has live surf cams from Mount Maunganui, Omanu, Papamoa and Waihi beaches.

It's enough to give you an idea of whether it's worth loading up the car with boards and wetsuits.

This site gives a good view of Auckland.

The bizarre is well catered for. Check out Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, which streams wedding ceremonies from the Vegas chapel, 24 hours a day with updates every few seconds.

At SuncamTV some guy drives around in his pick-up all day beaming pictures of the road ahead via a wireless link.

"We at SunCamTV want to archive Florida for many people that do not have a chance to visit this sunshine state!" say the creators.

From somewhere in middle America is Coolercam. "Hang out for a while and you might see one of us get a drink from the cooler," we're told.

Sounds exciting considering it's a 24- hour camera feed but the cooler is only visited during office hours.

Then there's GhhostWatch where you can peer out from a gloomy linen cupboard in the hope of spotting the ghost of a young Irish lass whose spirit haunts the former Irish linen mill. The picture is updated every 30 seconds. There were no apparitions when I checked in.

Best of all, most of the web cameras are free to view and won't eat into your data download caps to a great degree. However, a few have had to start charging to cope with demand.

At Ambit's NASA Cams you can view various activities at Nasa's launch pads, but you now have to pay a $5 donation for access.

You may find a camera you'd like to have on your desktop and check in on for relaxation.

You may need Real Player or Windows Media Video to run them, but generally they're easy to access.

The webcam phenomenon raises an interesting question about privacy.

Do we really want to be watched as we stroll down the streets of our cities and towns?

Will it get to the stage where a webcam user will be subpoenaed because they see a mugging or worse happen while watching a web camera?

I can hear that can of worms being opened right now.

On a completely different subject, Slashdot has links to an online version of Ray Bradbury's best-ever short story - A Sound of Thunder. This spooky gem is being made into a movie starring Ben Kingsley.

I don't know how it will translate, but everyone should read the short story and, thanks to the web, that will cost you nothing but your time.

* Email Peter Griffin