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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.
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).
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.
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)
Regular ol' television (NTSC) is only 30 frames per second so if they get to see the grandkid in real time at the same quality they'd get if they were watching him\her on VHS it would probably be quite acceptable.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
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