Bleeding-edge browsers have the ability to connect directly to hardware webcams, making it unnecessary to run a Java-based client program to operate your video spectrometer.

To enable the feature in Google Chrome, navigate to chrome://flags, scroll down and enable the "MediaStream" entry. You'll have to restart the browser:

Mobile browsers

Only one mobile (Android) browser (Opera Mobile) currently supports getUserMedia/MediaStream. It connects directly to the camera of the phone, which is exciting for mobile spectrometry.

Flash-based fallback

A Flash-based video capture system is partially implemented, and should soon work for browsers without the MediaStream API.