Let it snow!

Heh — cool web toy of the moment (if you have a webcam — without a cam you can read about it and see the sample images, but the effect just won’t quite be the same): Webcam Snowstorm.

This experiment simulates a snowfall with 400 snowflakes on screen, each with random size, rotation, speed and blur (using BlurFilter). Each of them is independently affected by wind (as partially controlled by your cursor’s x position). That Flash can run it all fluidly is impressive in itself, but of course there’s more. It’s also monitoring the webcam input, detecting edges, and making the snowflakes settle gently on any horizontal surface they encounter – pretty cool.

If you don’t have a webcam, you can still see the snowfall, and I’ve appended a picture of it in action below. If you do, try playing around with it – one of the neatest things I think is to let some snow pile up on your head or shoulders and then brush it off with your hand… virtual dandruff!

If you’re on a Mac, you may need to tweak the Flash player settings a touch to get it to work. Right-click on the flash movie, choose “Settings…”, switch to the webcam tab (fourth along the bottom), and set it to a different video input (for my iSight, it ended up being “IIDC FireWire Video”).

(via TDavid)