Allow demo to connect to webcam on host device

[spacey-sooty]

I have no clue how to do this but it'd be sick if you could connect to say a laptop webcam in the demo.

[mcm001]

Not super possible. We'd need to put the photonvision backend into your browser lol

[ancientstraits]

I feel like this could be possible. You can get cameras from the browser, and WebAssembly also exists, to compile the PhotonVision backend to a format that can be run in browsers. So it is possible, but would take a lot of effort. However, I am interested in WebAssembly, and this seems like it would be a good exercise for me to learn more about using it.

I realized that the PhotonVision backend is written partly in C++, and mostly in Java. It would be possible to compile all the C++, and then run the Java with CheerpJ, but making sure everything works well (since PhotonVision depends on a lot of external libraries like OpenCV and WPILib) would be a difficult process.

[samfreund]

@ancientstraits if you're interested in trying it, feel free. However, this is likely going to be pretty complicated, and it's not necessarily a priority at this time. There's lots of other issues or features that you could also try and work on, but if you really want to do this, we would probably accept a PR.

[spacey-sooty]

I feel like this could be possible. You can get cameras from the browser, and WebAssembly also exists, to compile the PhotonVision backend to a format that can be run in browsers. So it is possible, but would take a lot of effort. However, I am interested in WebAssembly, and this seems like it would be a good exercise for me to learn more about using it.

I realized that the PhotonVision backend is written partly in C++, and mostly in Java. It would be possible to compile all the C++, and then run the Java with CheerpJ, but making sure everything works well (since PhotonVision depends on a lot of external libraries like OpenCV and WPILib) would be a difficult process.

I was also thinking this could be done with web assembly 🙂 I'd love to see some work on this as I think it'd be really cool. Happy to review and test out any PRs you make

[mcm001]

I mean atp you’re just re-writing all of photon right?

[spacey-sooty]

I think you could hypothetically compile it to WASM and ship it in the browser. Not super sure how you'd ship it though.