Petra the webcams that go on the home computers are the same concept only their resolution is not as good. Those cameras are intended to capture an image that is only a couple of feet away... so if you point it out the window you probably wouldn't see much (blurry).
The cameras that are used are more like the larger surveillence cameras because they can take sharper photos OR they are still digital cameras with telephoto type lenses, that are set up to take a shot every 30 seconds, or minute.
Hope this helps make it a little clearer.
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The famous Kat Kam, Vancouver, B.C. Canada
http://www.katkam.ca/
They offer 3 different views of the city-they change the camera direction when they feel like it.
Here is some technical information about their setup - but each is different - its just to give you an idea of what is done. Some of it is pretty "techie" but understand they take great pride in their photos and have had the Kat Kam running for quite a while. "People Cams" wouldn't necessairly be as techinical:
How the Kat Kam works...or doesn't (Read this before you e-mail us with equipment questions!)
If the current image in your web browser is old, and you are 100% positive that the problem is not your browser having trouble refreshing, what has probably happened is that we're offline for maintenance, or something has become disconnected, or one or more of the componants has/had lost power, or there is a service interruption originating at our ISP. It could be a problem at the user's ISP too. Or one of us has screwed up and improperly set the capture device.
If the cloudy sky has a blue hue (or tint or whatever) at dawn or dusk, that's just the camera doing its own compensation; it's not a filter. There are no filters used in this operation. I've tried pretty much every combination of settings and nothing works to remove the bluing of the clouds at dawn and dusk.
Also, during rainy and cloudy conditions, please do not expect a crisp, perfectly focused picture.
If you wonder how the Kat Kam works, and/or want to put together your own webcam:
The camera is a 2004 Olympus C-5060 Widezoom digital camera.
It is attached to a photo capture program written by Randall in C# .NET over many grueling hours.
NOTE: The Katkam Capture program is now available for sale. Click here for details.
An absolutely gorgeous example of someone else's use of the Katkam Capture program: The Weather Mine, Canmore (Rocky Mountains), Alberta, Canada
Shots are saved (usually at 5 minute intervals) in JPG format at 90% quality for way smaller file-size and faster downloading than when saved at 100% quality.
Randall also wrote a PERL script running on the webserver to generate the thumbnail collection pages based on your input.
Old stuff:
The former setup was a Kodak DC240 Zoom digital camera attached to a modified video capture program supplied by Kodak's Web tech department. We used a developer API (application program interface) from Kodak, which provided a COM object interface to the underlying driver. Unfortunately, the Kodak API and/or driver was very buggy and crashed the Katkam computer often twice or more a day. The product and tech support were discontinued shortly after Telemark acquired it.
And the setup before that was a Hitachi High-8 (analog video) camera attached to a Snappy interface, which served us well until the camera had its meltdown. It would take a number of captured frames (1, 2, 4 or 8) and interpolate (layer) them to make a denser, higher resolution image.
