Video Conferencing: Will it work?
19-December-2003
permalink email thisA short entry this time because its eight o'clock on a Friday and I'm the only one left in the office.
A short entry this time because its eight o'clock on a Friday and I'm the only one left in the office. Still, my hangover from yesterday's office Christmas party has subsided enough for me to write this post.
I spent an hour this afteroon messing around with a video chat application that our friend Ray, from Raycom in the Netherlands, has set up.
The background is that for the new Special Interest Group on Open Source Software, which we are launching in the new year, we have said we want to try out video conferencing. We have looked a number of commercial applications for multi point video conferencing and concluded that they were not always well designed - too much clutter - overpriced and that there were a lot of issues with firewalls. Ray has set up a demo using a Flash MX server and it works pretty sweetly. We will probably go with this.
I have been using iChat on my Mac for point-to-point communication since the summer. A few quick conclusions. firstly it is workable - it is very, very easy to use. The only real problem is that the latency can be bad - especially so between my office in Bremen and the Knownet main office in Bangor. But the big discovery is that it does make a difference being able to see people and chat. We have not tried multi point communicatuion yet. If we can make it technically easy, it may be very useful. It may well be that the latency issue will not be so big in a larger group where you need to take turns anyway.
Video still has novelty value. One of the amusing things is everyone wants to come and watch and wave to people at the other end. It must have been like this when they first invented the telephone!
Especially in the context of European projects where we have partners working togther from eight or nine countries, it could revolutionise the way we work and hopefully cut down on travel. Firstly travel is time consuming, secondly it is very tiring and thirdly it causes an awful lot of pollution. It is not enviromentally sustainable to keep expanding air travel in the way we are.
OK - so I gues Apple's application is ahead of anything available for the PC as yet. But, generally, what Apple do one year the PC will do two years later. I think video conferecing could change many of the ways we work togther. More on the next few weeks. I will also post something on the use of text chat whcih I have been experimenting with.
OK - that is all for now. I am off for a pint and then an early night.
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