Halloween 2006 - what was new!

Halloween 2005 was a lotta fun but there is always room for improvement - I have some ideas for Halloween 2006 and please comment on HULK's halloween blog with any of your ideas.


1. The Incredible Hulk.   The Big Green Guy will definately be back!

2. There was one webcam in 2005, but for halloween 2006, there will be three!

3. Some sort of text based light board where you can enter the text.   I got this clever idea from these guys where they have a webcam pointing at a computer screen, and you can enter some text and it is displayed. Would be really cool if I could have some sort of alphanumeric text board that I could feed data too. Ended up having a laptop visible on webcam3 (Haunted Office Cam) and web surfers could do "Instant Message via webcam" - was a ton of fun - see the halloween messages.

4. Possible new bells & whistles with Webcam and Webcontrol.   The Webcam and WebControl (which allowed folks to not only view the lights in real-time, but also turn them ON and OFF) is a big hit, so I'm always curious to see what technologies come my way this year to see how they can be used.

5. Streaming video on webcam.   Related to point #4 above, I'd love to do streaming video rather than refreshed JPEG's. Last year a meta-refresh was used which caused a "blink" in the image - this year, Javascript makes for smoother updates.

6. Display which countries Halloween 2006 web surfers are coming from.   Since I have the geolocation stuff working, it would be fairly simple to generate a percentage breakdown by country of where surfers are coming from. I thought about this in the past, but in late September, a neighbor suggested this also ... so I ended up doing a Google Map implementation - check out all the pumpkins on the Halloween Maps! ;-)


I'll be putting up my halloween decorations in late September, so check back then to where you can view and control 'em via the halloween webcam - halloween 2006 will be even better!

Update #1: They are up!

Update #2: Worked pretty darn well and was a ton of fun! Will be building on these concepts for christmas 2006 and also see what is planned for halloween 2007.