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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.
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.
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).
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.
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:
Actually a good point.
We tried this a work a while back and it turns out that most people will not turn it on.
They don't want to see or be seen. It also got rid of the travel, meaning free lunch & time away from your desk.
It might be wise to try and find out if would actually be used before plunking down the cash.