web interfaces for robots

[John Slater]

The days of using a beeping speaker or blinking LED to convey information may soon be history.

The IPod Nano has a video camera,  and for certain the next IPod Touch ($200) will have a video camera in addition to its wi-fi and browser capabilities.

This page  (you need to use the Firefox browser,  or something other that IE, to see this demo)

http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/DynamicContentInjection/play.xhtml

shows

• a browser taking in a video feed
•   using JavaScript to detect 2 blobs from the video
  
•  displaying various forms of information using the position of the 2 blobs
  

You could also send  the positions of the blobs to a server/device using ajax,  get a response back and do something useful with it.

All the code is trivial (to me).  Assuming your robot is large enough to carry an IPod Touch  (a BoeBot or larger),  what kinds of interfaces or interactions do you envision?

John