“On Screen”
Holy Cow!! It’s not exactly Star Trek quality yet (at least not at 20kbps) but oh my gosh, is video conferencing amazing! This evening I stayed late after work and waited till Tara got up (Pennsylvania being exactly 12 hours behind Cambodia). Signed onto ichat and did and audio plus video conference. Talk about technological magic. I hate to say, because it makes me sound old, but back in my days as a kid on the mission field we got to talk on the phone once a year to family back home, if we were lucky. Letters took 4 weeks round trip on a good month. But this, this was a _free_ phone call with real-time video.
Araella sat on the couch for a moment and then burst out with Dah-Dee!! doing the baby-sign at the same time. A child of the millenium, she knows what video is, but real time interaction was definitely new for her. In the first 30 seconds she was trying to peer around the back of the computer to see if I was hiding out there. Next she was looking at the preview image of herself and bending her head back and forth to see what happened.
Again, it’s not Star Trek quality yet. Audio was clear with only a slight delay as long as we didn’t interrupt each other too much. Video was smooth frame rate, but at the sacrifice of resolution. Sometimes the signal got bogged down and faces became a blur of pixel’s but most of the time it was a pretty clear picture.
I have to sing the praises of Macintosh. Isight cameras on two G5 imacs on opposite sides of the planet. Windows doesn’t come close to matching the quality. How do I know – nearly all my friends on this side who do video conferencing with family back home use Mac. And many of them switched intentionally. And their family back in the States? They switched too; just because it worked easier and better. We tried Yahoo Messenger and it couldn’t even handle the video, let alone audio. Video was choppier than a disco in slow motion.
The next step is to get my parents online. They have ichat and isight and broadband. With isight you can even do a three-way video/audio conference making it possible for Tara in PA, Parents in NM, and Barak in Cambodia to all see each other at the same time… It may max out my bandwidth, but so far ichat has held up really well. On two broadband lines in the States I bet the picture quality and audio would be right up there with Captain Picard on the Enterprise.
