Are there apps which can turn an iPod into a surveillance device, specifically a motion sensor camera streaming live to an online source?
Could you PLEASE start providing more details in your threads about questions your friend has about her apple device?
Short answer, no. The iDevices don’t have the hardware necessary to do motion detection. There are apps that attempt to simulate that by taking photos and doing a comparison, but the effectiveness is limited and it drains the battery pretty quick.
It’s pretty easy to use webcams to set up surveillance and stream it online. See this lifehacker article for one example. Google will turn up plenty of others.
Fair enough. A lot of times, I get her information piece by piece as the situations develop & I try to help her long distance over the phone. I know she has an iPod touch.
Wrong.
The iPod Touch has a accelerometer and a camera, so it could, in theory, be hacked to do just this. But it would require jail breaking the device to do this without the owner’s knowledge.
You’re not really talking about motion detection, then. You’re talking about motion sensing. In other words, detecting that the phone itself is moving, rather than detecting motion of objects in the phone’s range.
That’s a trivial task, but I have no idea how that would be useful for providing surveliance footage.
And nobody said anything about doing this without the owners’ knowledge. You’re off on a tangent.
How is watching changes over time of a picture not motion detection?
Because they are talking about the kind of motion detection where the device will do nothing until motion is detected, it will then start recording video/taking photos/whatever.
I am still not seeing the difference. The phone detects motions and then takes action.
There are apps that turn your iPod into a webcam over wifi. Aren’t there computer programs to use webcams as security cameras? You’ll need a computer though.
If you want a stand alone device, there are cameras that work alone over wifi.
The difference is that it’s only simulating motion detection, and not very well. It could not detect something that moves past the camera between pictures. It’ll also be significantly limited in low-light environments. The camera has a much more limited field of view than a motion detector would, making it essentially omni-directional.
If it somehow does detect motion and starts streaming video, it cant take still photos any more, so it’s unable to detect when it should stop.
That’s not to mention the real life hardware limitations of taking pictures constantly as a way to simulate motion detection. The battery will drain in about 20 minutes, making it useless as a surveillance tool.
There are inexpensive tools that do the job much better. You can sharpen a pencil with an iPhone, too, but not very well, and not as easily as buying a cheap pencil sharpener.
What is real motion detection? How is it different than using a camera to detect motion?
There is nothing that prevents taking a picture while taking movies. Depending on the resolution of the picture there might be a small artifact in the streaming video. AT&T is currently running right now an add with a goat espousing thing as a cool thing their phone does? This cool feature is in software. There is no particular reason that someone could not do something similar with any other smart phone.
By far the biggest drain in a current smart phone is the backlight of the screen. If you keep the screen off the the battery drain for a low sample rate motion detection should not be terrible.
I have seen some really cool spatial awareness demo apps that used the speaker and microphone sort of like sonar detecting motion.
In short smart phones have the possibility of being used to spy on you. The basic difference between a cool app and a spy app is who is in control of when and where the data goes.
Most motion detection (especially for home security) uses sound or vibration.
Really? I thought it was mostly infrared, either active or passive.
Huh I thought it was % change in pixels of a video.
In helping a friend see what was digging under his house I have found workable motion detection software for iOS. I don’t recall the specific app but I tried 3 or 4.
Really the best thing to do is go to the app store and search for “motion detection” or “security camera” and try some of the apps. Everyone has a different view on user interfaces, pick one that appeals to you. The one I found would e-mail photos to you when motion was detected.