The whole idea of the interface I created was to allow people a nice interface to scan backwards or forwards through images in the AntCam Image Archive. I have roughly 200,000 JPEG images stored covering the past 9 months of time. Included are also Hourly and Daily MPEGS which effectively show a time lapse movie of what the ants did that hour or day.

I believe that people will find using the Journal in conjunction with the VCR like interface controls will provide a much richer experience than simply scanning images in the archive directly since clicking on the image in the Journal will provide the AntCam with the settings to display the larger image - AND allow you to easily step forward or backward to see subsequent or previous images. Also using the Journal one can see what observations I have made - and then look for yourself so you get some background about what is happening - and what I feel is important. With the Time Increment settings you can choose to step through the archive in increments as small as one minute - to as large a step as a full day.

For example say you want to do a quick scan of what's in the archive. One way might be to look at the Journal - the other would be to Set the time increment to 1 day - the date to the beginning of the archive (1999.6.8.0.0) - and the Refresh Delay Control to the maximum your connection can handle (clicking on the appropriate link here will show you the example just discussed 60 sec 14.4Kb, 30 sec 28.8Kb, 10 sec 64Kb, 5 sec 128Kb) then sit back and look at the 200+ daily images that will be displayed to you. Using the Refresh Delay Control one simply controls the speed of the image refresh if one just wants to sit back and view a sequence of images in Time Increment steps.. Also one can use the Media Type Control to select what type of data one might want to view. If you select Hourly or Daily MPEG and you see a JPEG image - simply clicking on the image will initiate the download of the appropriate MPEG movie clip.

Finally clicking on Interface Help will take you to a set of pages that will explain all of the elements of the AntCam interface.

This content is under copyright© protections
and may be reproduced only with written consent from Randy Rencsok