Do not run out onto the highway at night to point your laptop's webcam into the headlights! We can devise more convenient and safer ways to test The Living Headlights, even if you have no car or do not drive.
A pair of LED flashlights is a good proxy for a pair of headlights. A flashlight with many LEDs (for example, 19) is preferable because it creates a denser circle of light that is more likely to be detected as exactly one blob. To ensure that the distance between the two flashlights remains constant, we can attach them to a rigid object, such as a board, using brackets, clamps, or tape. Here is an image of my flashlight holder, seen from the side:
The next image shows a frontal view of the flashlight holder, including a decorative grill:
Set up the lights in front of the webcam (parallel to the webcam's lens), run the app, and make sure that the lights are being detected. Then, using a tape measure, find the distance between the webcam and the...
