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Video Chat Via Transparent Desktop Overlay
Jason0x21 writes "Wired News has an article about UNC Comp. Sci. researchers developing a transparent desktop overlay for video conferencing, allowing remote coworkers to literally point and interact with things on your screen. The researchers say that Apple's Quartz graphics engine let them go from idea to prototype in 'about 45 minutes'. Windows versions predicted in the future."
Is cocoa more responsible for fast development prototyping? Quartz is just an API. And I'm pretty sure there isn't a NSVideoConferenceWindow () in it.... or is there?
So, let's say those clever folks over at whatever-Gator-calls-themselves-now gets the brilliant idea that they could download one of them thar transparent-overlay-thingies whenever you browse to random-evil-webpage. Then, whoosh! They can sell remote access to your desktop so that advertisers can move all the annoying icons out of the way so that you can see the advertising more clearly. Or whatever. An since the overlay is transparent, the user can't figure out what is happening and simply thinks their system is posessed by the devil.
Looks like a reflection, rather than a transparent window.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Funny you mention that, I talked about the very thing at work receantly. I (and others) were thinking of the feasablity of impleminting RPD or VNC on all desktops. Rather than go to an office or lab to fix a problem, just take control of the computer and do it. Well, after a little though, I decided this was horrible idea. It would ottally depersonalize the support experience. No longer would customers deal with people, some faceless entity would just grab their computer and fix it. True, in either case the computer gets fixed, but I've taken enough psychology to know that people prefer to have fact to face contact and some real interaction.
My dad experiences this too. He's a sales VP and his job requires world travel. Well, techincally, he could sit in his office and do it all. I mean it's all just negoating deals, prices, numbers, and contracts. This could all be done via phone, fax and the Internet. Well, guess what? Some things just don't change and nothing at this point replaces going and actually metting somebody, shaking their hand, having dinner, and discussing things face to face.
Less efficent? Yes, but we are social creatures. Something about direct human contact is just important to use and not replicatable via technology.
How on earth did this get modded as Insightful?. It shows a lack of insight. Perish the though that people may collaborate on a project from different geographical locations.
Hmm... I wonder how many of those 6 billion that have access to Macs and FireWire cameras.
If I get this correctly--and it appears most everyone else does not--I see your alpha-blended image as if you were sitting in my place; similarly, you see mine. Not flipped, or virtualized, but 'reflected' as if we were sitting in each other's place. Anyone who has worked developing and using and testing collaborative solutions will recognize that there is, potentially, a real AHA! here. VNC, NetMeeting and WebEx and all that clever crap is limited or useless, except in the hands of sophisticated people doing support or in very narrowly defined lecture settings, because these applications all abstract the notion of the absent party. You know I am moving the cursor on your machine because on your screen it has a red box around it, while I see an unboxed cursor. I may be talking to you over a voice channel, and we learn to abstract a collaborative session in our heads from voice and visual cues. If you think ordinary mortals can learn and map that cue-based interaction to natural behavior so they can just work together on a document then you labor in ignorance. The AHA! here is that the absent party is not abstracted, they are substituted via alpha-blending. Hard to say without seeing and feeling this is in action, but my hunch is this is literally a big step forward from the user perspective. People will get whom is doing what without confusion. Contemporary marketing practice would argue UNC make the code open source but patent and license the cute little red finger-tracker-dealies for this use.