I have been wanting to write something that detects things in real-time, on images streamed from a webcam. People who have watched the RoboCop, Terminator, or Iron Man movies, will probably remember the rectangles or circles around objects in video, with a description next to it. While having a rectangle around my head would be a good start, I’d like my computer to also recognize other things, such as a book, a key or any other object. But to do this, I needed a simple interface to my webcam, so that I can say with one function that I want to read in a frame from the webcam.