This example starts *very* small, performing no image recognition but instead loading video from the the closest webcam (on a laptop, usually the integrated camera) and displaying the video in two windows using the OpenCV resources built-in for displaying video to the screen. One window is BGR (standard colorspace for video of this sort in OpenCV) and the others is a grayscale conversion performed using the cvtColor() function and the CV_BGR2GRAY specifier.

The beauty is just how bloody easy this is to do in OpenCV. This is incredible stuff and SO very straight forward. Big shout out to Bernát Gábor for compiling the resources to get me thru this in a few hours.