Cam broadcasts for adults

The USB cable supplies power to the webcam from the computer and takes the digital information captured by the webcam's image sensor back to the computer—from where it travels on to the Internet.Some cams work wirelessly and don't need to be connected to a computer: typically they use Wi-Fi to transmit their pictures to your Internet router, which can then make them available to other machines on your home network or, using the Internet, to anyone, anywhere in the world.

It all sounds simple enough, but how do webcams actually work? Photo: This Microsoft Life Cam VX-1000 webcam can stand on a table or clip to the screen of a laptop.Unlike a digital camera, a webcam has no built-in memory chip or flash memory card: it doesn't need to "remember" pictures because it's designed to capture and transmit them immediately to a computer.That's why webcams have USB cables coming out of the back.All webcams work in broadly the same way: they use an image sensor chip to catch moving images and convert them into streams of digits that are uploaded over the Internet.The image sensor chip is the heart of a webcam—so how does that bit work? Take the outer case off a webcam and you'll find it's little more than a plastic lens mounted directly onto a tiny electronic circuit board underneath.

When you take a digital photo or stare into your webcam, light zooms into the lens.