2) Computer Camera

COMPUTER CAMERA

A webcam is an input device that allows computer-users to share what they record with viewers who are connected to the Internet. While people commonly use webcams for person-to-person communication, the inventors of the webcam did not originally design the device for this purpose. Its inventors were not trying to revolutionize the way we communicate; they were trying to save themselves unnecessary walks to the coffee pot.

History :

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is definitely its father. Case in point, here’s an interesting tidbit of imaging history: the first webcam ever was actually invented by lazy students at Cambridge University who didn’t want to waste a trip to the nearby coffee pot if it was going to be empty when they got there.

In 1991,too many trips to an empty coffee pot led Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky to invent the world's first webcam to help late night studiers and programmers keep an eye on coffee levels.This coffee machine that was the inspiration for the world’s first webcam was located in a corridor just outside The Trojan Room in the old computer lab at Cambridge University.

A sample still from the first webcam (left) and the last photo the webcam ever shot (right)

Once switched on, the camera would display a 129×129 pixel grayscale picture of the coffee pot at 1 frame per second on the user’s desktop. Ironically, the “webcam” actually predates the “web” by a couple of years, but as soon as the World Wide Web went up, the service was connected to the internet.

The camera was actually switched off in August of 2001, and all that’s left if you try and pull the feed is a link to the last ever picture the webcam took. The coffee machine itself was auctioned off on eBay for over $5,000 to German magazine Der Spiegel, where it was refurbished and put back to work by Krups.

MODELED BY AMAL NAMBIAR

FACTS :

So the image sensor is the "electronic eye" of a webcam or a digital camera. It's a semiconductor chip made of millions of tiny,light-sensitive squares arranged in a grid pattern. These squares are called pixels. Basic webcams use relatively small sensors with just a few hundred thousand pixels(typically a grid of 640  × 480. Good 
digital cameras use sensors with many more pixels that's why cameras are compared by how many megapixels(millions of pixels) they have.  A basic webcam has about 0.3 megapixels (300,000 in other words), while a digital camera with 6 megapixels has over 
20 times more-probably arranged in a rectangle with three thousand across and two thousand down (3000 × 2000= 6 million). A better camera rated at 12 megapixels would have 4000 × 3000 pixel sensor. Take a photo the same size with those two cameras and 12 megapixels with give you 1000 more dots horizontally and 1000 more vertically -  smaller dots giving more detail and higher resolution. A single pixel in a really good sensor is something like 10 micrometers(10µm) in diameter (5-10 times smaller than the diameter of a typical human hair).

Footnotes: Sources : Thanks to google and wikipedia