The Covid pandemic has meant that I’m in the house a lot more, and travel has been restricted/difficult to say the least. Since I’ve been more involved in video streaming technology professionally recently, I decided to build a project based off these techologies to relieve some of the cabin fever.

Demo video is at https://youtu.be/sXxcPxjwLj8.

The World Window shows a live webcam of various locations around the world, behind a real window frame. To change location, you can move the plane around a world map to pre-determined locations (lit by small LEDs) – the plane is magnetic to sticks to the map.

In addition to this, there is another sensor that tracks your position in front of the frame, to give a false sense of perspective when moving around in front of the frame.

All code for the World Map Arduino sketch, Thermal Sensor Arduino sketch, Python VLC/HLS generation script and Android TV app is available at https://github.com/shakso/WorldWindow