July Meeting Report
Marshall Ahern
For some time members of Club Mac have considered the possibility of making it possible for members who can't attend Club meetings to participate in the meeting or otherwise enjoy some of pleasure of attending. “We are a computer club, there must be a way. What about online video?”
There is no doubt that the problems are formidable, but can recent advances provide a way? Apple have recently introduced iSight, a Firewire web camera and microphone system — Ben Riley from Computers Now brought one to our July Club meeting to demonstrate its capabilities. iSight needs the newly introduced AV version of iChat, OS X 10.2.5, and a Broadband internet connection to fully use the video facility. Full-duplex audio needs only a 56k modem connection.
The system connects via the Internet any two Macintoshes that have iSight and iChat AV in a fully duplex, real time video conference. Later this year an iSight Macintosh will be able to conference with any PC runnning Windows video conferencing software.
iChat supports three levels interaction:
text, via the keyboard:
voice, via a microphone and speaker:
and video, requiring a camera and the AV version of iChat.
It uses new, very powerful compression to achieve fast internet video.
Ben brought two iSights and two Airport equipped laptop Macs to demonstrate the video connection between the two machines. He showed us the system running on one machine with monitor showing the scene in the room as seen by the panning camera. But when he tried to set up the network between the two Macs, gremlins struck. Try as he might, he couldn’t get the network running. Many members sympathised (empathised?). The demonstration showed enough to allow us to see the possibilities, particularly conferencing from one Mac to another single Mac. But what about putting our Club meetings on the internet with twenty or thirty remote members following the meeting and interacting? Unfortunately for that we need a meeting room with a network connection.
Our thanks to Ben and Computers Now.
