Ever since the beginning of the new millenium, I’m sure we’ve all been hearing about how video chatting and video conferencing is going to make the current telephone technology obsolete. Ever since the feasible affordability of the video technology was assured, many third party developers raced to provide computer users with the tools necessary to meet people face-to-face via computer screen. Many developers didn’t have the right touch/combination of framerate, ease of use and price while some did. Unfortunately, the price and implementation was still out of the reach of most users.
Enter Apple with their killer combo of iChat/iSight. Widely hailed as the best in the market, even from the affordability standpoint, there was still one more hurdle: marketshare. Not enough users to really make getting the $150 iSight a worthwhile investment. Well, now all that is changing. Last spring we got an iSight for this computer, an iMac G5, I’m currently writing this on. The reason was simple: we were meeting new people with Macs. Not only that, but other family members were considering or getting Apple Macs, too! The cool thing about Mac computers now (especially their laptops!) is the integrated iSight camera, which is much less obtrusive than the four inch long behemoth sitting next to my G5.
Our friend in Germany, Christian, is a recent purchaser of an Apple MacBook. Being the modest showoff that he is, when I went on iChat to instant message him, he instead invited me to a vidchat! Here’s how it looked:
(click the picture to enlarge!)
In case anyone is wondering, the frame rate was a bit choppy at times, but otherwise it was as smooth as any videocamera could produce! We had no problem with sound and understanding one another. I’ll have to say that this is a great advertisment as to what Apple’s machines are capable of. Also earlier this year, I was involved in a four way vidchat with several guys I met online. I kid you not, the experience was almost every bit like Apple advertises on its iChat adpage. Of course, I had to be the one hosting it, since I had the biggest bandwidth for iChat’s only drawback as a bandwidth (and memory) hog!
This alone, I feel, should be enough to convince anyone to switch from Windows! Good luck trying this on any other PC without having to wrestle with software issues, driver goofups and firewall headaches.
Cheers!
Technorati Tags: Apple, iChat, iSight, Videoconferencing, Communication
