Persistent Home Videoconferencing Solution?

An anonymous reader writes "I'm moving very soon for work, and will be several hundred miles away from my young family for six to nine months. Obviously I'll travel back as often as possible, and there's always Skype and XBLA video, but the whole 'now it's time to talk to dad' thing seems ... a little weak. I was wondering the Slashdot community could help me come up with a more persistent solution. Ideally what I want is an always-on connection between a pc/monitor/camera/speakers in my old kitchen and my new kitchen, so if we're in the kitchens, we can see each other and interact semi-normally. (We're a kitchen-focused family.) Most solutions I can find time out pretty quick, or require some knowledge on the part of the users, and the tech-savvy people are only going to be in one kitchen, to put it politely!" (Read on for a few more details.) "I do have a reasonable number of Windows PCs and Macs (and game consoles), but no alt. OS machines, so something for retail OSes would be better — I haven't tested the PS3 camera for long durations, but I know the conferencing quality with a PS3 is pretty good, and that could be an option too. Any camera recommendations would be good. We have sweet access at our house, but it will need to be wireless to the kitchen from the router."

Comments

Skype + Auto Answer

[petree]

Create a dedicated Skype account which is set to auto start video and accept calls from it's contact list, add your skype to that contact list and you're all set. All you have to do is click call whenever you're in your kitchen and there will be a video uplink. Runs on windows or mac with any old x86 box and webcam, pretty close to $0. Just make sure the PC doesn't go to sleep (more than $0).

I tried this a few times

[DNS-and-BIND]

I live overseas, and a couple of times I tried to "sit in" on family gatherings (Thanksgiving & Christmas) by virtually "being there" via a webcam and wireless laptop. I literally had a seat in the living room with a laptop sitting there. It didn't work as well as I would have liked. Why? Well for one I couldn't move the webcam about, so as to look at people. Eye contact is very important, I discovered. It gets tiring staring at the same scene directly across from the laptop, and people can't be bothered to move you about. Sort of like being a head in a jar on Futurama - they all have Kabuki-style dedicated assistants to carry them (or robotic bodies). Second, as you're remotely in and your voice is tinny by being on a laptop speaker, it's kind of distracting for everyone else. It always seemed to sidetrack the discussion whenever I said anything. Maybe this was due to novelty, I'm not sure if your family would get used to it after time. Third, even though I was eating the closest thing I could get to a nice dinner (the fanciest bento box they had at the department store, like fifteen bucks which I would have never bought ordinarily), it still wasn't the same as having dinner with the family. Fourth, the time zones although if you go north-south this isn't an issue. I gave up after a few times and just telephoned in and the family handed the phone around until I had had a chat with everyone. Maybe if they fastened the laptop onto a Roomba or something that would have helped.

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[account_deleted]

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Two Laptops?

[jarich]

I'm not seeing the most obvious answer. Put two laptops in the kitchen. Use wireless internet. Use laptops with built in video cameras. Run any of the IM programs that have video capability. Just leave the laptops turned on. Someone walks in, looks over, and says "Hi!"