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Are Videophones Ready for Prime Time?
Amigan asks: "Looking for a gift for my parents who live 1500+ miles away, I came across the Vialta Beamer TV. This device, with its claimed ease of use, would be helpful for my parents to see my son via the phone, but I'm wondering if the glowing WSJ review or Tech TV review are for real. Is 4-15 fps viable for conversation?"
Why not just buy a webcam and do it online? With two good connections you're probably looking at a bettter framerate.
I read an interesting report (SF Chron I think) that said deaf users discovered that Apple's iChat has a sufficiently high frame rate and resolution to use sign language over video, and no other products had a high enough frame rate to do the job adequately. But then, AFAIK iChat and the iSight does 30fps. I suspect this doesn't directly apply to you, but I though you might find it interesting as some sort of benchmark.
Only on the WB and not until 2005 you have to have something to follow up that crazy Bernie Mac!
WAH!
No personally I love gadgets but I wouldnt want to subject any of my friends and family to my pasty white face. If I ever have a dire need I can use a webcam but I think it is too 'gimmiky'.
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
It is ~30 fps on LAN and it is useable, as in voice and video are coherent, picture is abit shaky but not painful. You can't move fast though
or else it'll be a blur.
However we use it to talk coast-to-coast. On
university-to-university network you get ~20 fps
and the quality degradation is notable. Now you
get a picture that is a bit retarded and when
someone moves (even medium speed) it results in
unhappiness.
Put the sucker on cable modem and you get 10 fps.
Now it is virtually unusable in the sense that you
are not getting much more than voice and what you
do get is painfully choppy and often artefacted.
IMHO, anything below 15 fps is not even worth
consideration.
I can't say i know anything about the product you list, but I have used Apple's iChat voice and video conferencing over broadband internet(east coast to west coast) and it works very well. The audio is very clean and well synched, and the video looks pretty good too. Mac only of course so if you have a speedy inexpensive computer rather than my pos ibook you're out of luck (or are very lucky depending on how you spin it).
Yawn.
I've used iChat with an iSight a bit over a cable modem to somebody at a university. It's worked pretty well. That's 30 fps.
You do, of course, need a Mac though.
[Additional agreement is not redundant, damn it!]
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Personally, I like being able to answer the phone without shaving, getting dressed, and combing my hair first.
For a quick, kind of dirty solution the Beamer product looks to be adequate but, again, it's not going to feel like face to face.
If you're looking for something with higher quality, there are standalone units that work over IP. The obvious advantage is broadband speed allowing much nicer frame rates (as several people have described with the Mac iChat system) and they don't require a PC (though some ISPs require PCs to set up broadband service). The disadvantages are setup (might be tough to talk a non-techie through it) and broadband cost (of course, this is cancelled out with frequent use because of long-distance savings).
D-Link has two TV-connecting IP videophone models, both wireless and wireful (the latter goes for $149.95 after $50 mail-in rebate at Amazon).
I think a better question is "Is it worth it?" What does one gain by using a video phone? Nothing, really. If there was some advantage over a normal phone, we'd already be using them.
Fortress of Insanity
FYI: The biggest telecomoperator from Belgium recently started to make publicity for this system.
It looks to be very easy in use.
This is RiverTonic's sig.
In Japan, DoCoMo offers video phone service over their 3G wireless network. I don't have DoCoMo myself (I use AU, I chose cost over features) but last night I actually had a chance to try out the videophone on a friend's mobile. Although the screen was small, the framerate seemed decent. In my opinion, the worst part was the sound, since you can't hold the earpiece up to your face while you're talking on the videophone, the phone relied on its external speakerphone mode, which definitely made the audio much less clear. However, if you hold the phone in one place and don't move around too much, mouth movements are transmitted quite clearly, with surprislingly little lag.
That aside, and perhaps most importantly, it really helped my brain to make the connection that I was actually talking to another person. I suppose that there must be a hard-wired light in the human brain that turns on when you actually see someone's face while you're talking to them. It's a bit hard to describe, but after trying it out, it's not difficult for me to believe that this is the future.
A major US cell company has a big sponsorship deal with the pro football this season.
They feature a mini-ad where the commentators in the booths show off their phones on air during the slow times on the field.
So far, they haven't been able to get them to work, the best they could do was call the other person, while on the air.
This says volumes about these phones, and the average user. I would guess that the majority of the advanced features go unused, and it is used just as a phone.
Consider this:
Movies are 24 FPS.
TV is 30 FPS (NTSC) or 25 FPS (PAL). (frames per second, not fields per second).
The "killer app" for video phones is not business conferencing - it is "Look at Grandma! Wave to Grandma!".
And we USED to use postcards (1 frame per WEEK) for that.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Several years ago I helped run some informal studies of people using small-frame video over IP for real-time communications. IIRC, some of the useful things that we learned were:
... to give the impression of continuous movement due to the idiosyncrasies of human perception.
Thats why the old fashioned 8mm movies were (usually) shot at that speed.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
is it compatible with my ham radio? If not, I'll just keep using SlowScan TV?
I like microcars
I wouldn't go with any product underneath 75fps. Any less than that and your losing some incredible amount of detail. 4-15fps is definately NOT GOING to cut it. 30fps might be a minimum but it'll lookbad
I suggest no videophone but just use a standerd webcam
You could make video phones work with 1280x1024 with 100 frames per second, but it still won't change the fact that people don't really like to be on camera. Tell me that you dont't feel slightly unsettled when walking into a bank and being faced with a camera pointing right at you. There is a reason why cameras are hidden under domes etc. People just do not like it.
Right now, people take it for granted that they have some privacy when answering the phone. You don't need to check what you look like, whether you need to brush hair, etc etc. Answering the phone in the middle of the night adds new hazards if you get out of bed insufficiently dressed etc.
If people wanted to do video phones, we'd be doing it already. And the people who do want to do it are using webcams, online chat, etc. The technology is already there.
A friend of mine bought several of those. He has one at his house, one at his sister's, one at his brother's, and one at his mother's house. He loves that.
Before he went out and set it up for his mother and sister, we tried it at work. We connected Beamer units to phone lines in our offices, as far as I can tell, it works very nicely. At least he is very happy about that. I don't ever remember him complaining about the frame rate.
We looked at D-Link units as well, but where his mother lives, there is no broadband connection, so we decided not to go that way.
Well, you could buy a pre-packaged setup like the Beamer, which would let you video-conf with any other Beamer users.
Or you could use a webcam and open standards, and be able to chat with any other PC/Mac users with a webcam
Reminds me of the first Soviet company to get a FAX machine. They were quite proud of themselves, until they realized they didn't have anyone else to call.
--
iChat does support one-way video chat. So if your parents feel awkward about being on camera. Fine! They don't need to be. You can have a camera on your Mac and initiate a one-way chat. That way they can see and hear their grandson and you can talk to them. iChat will also work with most FireWire equipped camcorders.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sure, videophone has been ready for prime time. Has been for what, 30 years? Unfortunately, prime time isn't ready for the videophone, and probably never will be.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
There are some good user reviews listed on this web page about this beamer phone:
http://vialta.com/bm80usersaresaying.htm
They seem to be happy little users.