With the Apple iSight and iChat, I had my first three way video conference yesterday, with my cousins Annabelle and Bradford.
Naturally, the first thing I did was pick my nose and clean my ears. One small step for man.
Getting started was a bit of a pain, as I had to open up about 16 ports within OS X’s built-in firewall. After figuring that out, it’s a matter of clicking the video camera icon with your buddy.
The quality on a Powerbook G4 is amazing. Audio comes through loud and clear, and video quality is crisp, as long as the bandwidth is sufficient (a T1 in Cupertino was more clear than ADSL at Lake Tahoe). If you look at the iChat screen shots, they utilize some basic, but cool 3d instructions to split the screen and mirror reflections of participants.
The iSight is a $150 toy and I drank Steve’s Kool-Aid. I don’t know nearly enough Mac people for this to be truly useful to me, and network effects are gonna require that I convince a lotta people to switch to Mac and get an iSight before this gets rip-roaring fun for me. Even then, how much value is there in a video of someone? I don’t know the answer to that one.