I tried using the beta capture interface in Chrome on my Galaxy S3. I ran into a couple issues that prevented me from taking a spectrum. The main issue is that it samples from the front facing camera and I can't figure out how to switch to the rear camera. This may be a WebRTC limitation in Android Chrome so I'm not sure if anything can be done about it. Also, it would be nice to be able to rotate the sampling row somehow on the initial screen. It's a really cool tool, and I'd really like to be able to use on my phone some day. It seems like building an Android app to do the video capture would solve a couple problems. It would avoid the WebRTC bugs, and it might give you some control over the camera's focus. I've found that when I use the camera app to photograph spectra I have to fight against autofocus or accidental re-focuses triggered by screen taps.

Hi, Nathan - yes, Chrome doesn't have a camera selection interface yet, and I've filed a bug report with the Chromium team. Firefox for Android does, and works really well. I believe Opera does too.

We'd like to keep interface parity, so while we are working on native apps, we are hoping to keep the HTML interface, and basically just create JavaScript methods for more advanced camera access and manipulation.

Thanks for the feedback!!

Thanks for the tip about Android Firefox, I just tried it out and was able to access my rear facing camera. I wasn't able to rotate the video feed. I tried pressing rotate button, but I'm not sure if it had any effect. The video feed kept repeating the same row of pixels after I pressed it (I'm not certain it was caused by it though). Also, the page would freeze after I pressed "begin capturing" sometimes (i.e. none of the buttons would work and the camera feed did not update).

W.r.t. native apps, have you looked into building a phonegap plugin? That could allow you to keep the HTML interface while using native code to control the camera feed.

We had a Phonegap prototype going but they do not expose the raw video feed, but require the user to go through the camera widget, unfortunately. I'm hoping that when we make more progress on the iOS version we can backport some of that stuff to PhoneGap.

I'll spend some time on the rotation feature; I just fiddled with and improved the interface today, so there are a few more changes;

I also hope the freezing will be fixed by Firefox soon -- they just pushed some new WebRTC changes out in an update. I also need some more testing phones :-)

Ok, I'm new to this group. I'm Biologist interested in capturing spectral data. I am often doing field work with no cell or wifi available and working with iOS devices. Is there a mobile version of the beta capture or other versions for iOS devices (iPhone), or will there be in the near future for the Spectral Workbench?