Paul Trueman
Arthur C Clarke may have correctly predicted the uses of orbiting satellites and artificial intelligence, but boy did he come a cropper with his notion of a video phone.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey a character makes a video call home from a space station, and chats to his daughter on a huge TV screen as easily as if she were in the same room.
Sadly, with little more than a year left before Clarke’s techno-predictions reach their sell-by date, mass-market video phones with that kind of performance are far from a reality (to say nothing of commercial lunar flights and the discovery of a menacing black monolith that sends a signal to Jupiter).
The only way most of us can get a piece of futurist video action is to trundle down to the nearest computer store and buy a webcam. If you have a personal computer and an Internet connection, you can be video- conferencing (as it’s rather grandly known) 10 minutes after the gizmo is out of the box.
Video-conferencing is a fair enough description if you are using one to brainstorm with work colleagues hundreds of kilometres away, but these affordable small PC video cameras can be used by families and friends as a novel alternative to the phone.
The basic idea is this: you contact another person by entering in the Internet protocol (IP) address of their online PC, just as you enter the phone number into a telephone. The drawback is that you’ll need to know this beforehand, and know where Windows keeps the information. (Click on Run from the Start menu, type “winipcfg” and hit enter to bring up the IP utility.)
Creative Labs’s WebPhone software gets around this by simply asking you for the e-mail address of the person, a piece of information you are far more likely to have readily available.
Before you get carried away and imagine that some kind of revolution in communication is afoot, realise this: the quality of video can look a little … well, in technical terms, rubbish.
Not only will the picture look small on your screen due to the limited resolution, but often the frame rate will drop so low it will look like a series of stills rather than moving video. This usually won’t have anything to do with the camera or your PC but with congestion across the Internet.
The top resolution a consumer webcam currently boasts is 640×480, but this is really only an advantage for recording video and taking stills, rather than broadcasting, because an average 56- kilobyte modem can’t supply enough bandwidth for that much data.
A huge resolution isn’t that beneficial for broadcasting anyway, since most video- conferencing software automatically uses the cut-down QCIF resolution of 176×144.
There are still plenty of reasons to broadcast one’s ugly mug across the Internet, however. Since you’re using the Internet for the “call” you’re only paying local call rates, no matter where your chums are.
If you don’t fancy the “live” approach, there are plenty of other uses for a webcam. You can use them to record short videos that can then be compressed and attached to e-mails, or use them in place of a digital camera to capture digital stills that you can then send or mess around with using a graphics package.
Alternatively, you could join the thousands of webmasters who have set up their webcams to feed live video to their Web pages, recording whatever it’s pointed at and beaming it down the phone line on to a website.
There are three ways of hooking up your webcam to your PC: by universal serial bus (USB) parallel port or by fitting a PCI card (the credit-card sized cards you slot into the PCMCI slots in laptops) in your PC.
USB finally seems to have taken over as the de facto interface for peripherals and is by far the most popular choice for webcam manufacturers. USB is expansive enough to carry both video and audio signals, so USB cams can have the microphone integrated into the camera (rather than the external mikes you may or may not get included with parallel port cams).
The software also determines what you can do with your webcam, but you and your friends don’t need to use the same packages to be able to communicate with each other.
Chances are you already have video- conferencing software on your PC. Microsoft’s popular NetMeeting package is bundled free within Internet Explorer.