Thu - February 19, 2004

To video chat using iChat AV, you need four things besides the messaging software itself: a FireWire-compatible camera (such as the iSight, which also incorporates a noise-cancelling microphone), people to talk to (called "Buddies"), a .Mac, America Online or free AIM account, and a broadband connection—preferrably, a fast one.

Once your computer is online and after you have entered your Buddies' .Mac, AOL, or AIM account names into iChat AV, you can began an instant messaging session, either by selecting a Buddy's name from a systemwide menu that is available in any application or by selecting a Buddy's name from your Buddy List (see graphic at left).

The Buddy List instantly shows you whether your Buddies are available and the kinds of communication that their systems will support. In my example graphic, EGMich has stepped away from her computer. Jud Mesch's system supports text chatting only. Dan Klens can text chat and voice chat (an ability represented by the telephone icon), and I can text chat, voice chat, or video chat (a status indicated by the video camera icon). The icons are clever, but they are also a little misleading because I can video chat with Dan, but because he has no camera, although we'll both be able hear each other, only he will see video.

To begin video chatting with a video-enabled Buddy, all I'd have to do is double click the green video camera icon to the right of his or her name or, alternatively, select his name and click on the gray video camera icon at the buttom of the Buddy List window.

iChat AV gives you a few seconds to preview yourself while it establishes a peer-to-peer video connection ("My hair! My makeup! My God!"), then it opens a live video window similar to the one on the right. Your image (represented, in the sample image, by an actor who looks like he spends the rest of his time asking "Can you hear me now?") appears in the lower left of the video chat window; your Buddy's image fills the rest of it.

When a chat is active, you have the option of pausing or muting conversation or taking a picture of the iChat AV window. You can also text-chat simultaneously with the same Buddy or other Buddies but can only have one active video chat open at a time.

Performance

iChat's performance from the DSL line in my home to my friend Dan's laptop on a wireless network in his Las Vegas hotel room was nothing short of extraordinary, with video frame rates regularly approaching 30 frames per second and no obvious artifacts or delays in audio. To give you some sense of how good video like that is, television and feature films are usually shown at 32 frames per second. So we're talking about really fast, really tolerable video devoid of jerky "man on the moon" movements.

Picture quality using the iSight was also quite sharp with well defined edges and little or no ghosting. The white balance wasn't terrific (Apple has since released a patch for that) and, as a result, I looked a little green during the chat. (Or perhaps I'm kidding myself and the color reflected my true lawyerly pallor—one step removed from the grave!)

Mobility

But the defining moment in all this—the epiphany that prompted me to write this post—came when Dan picked up the laptop and started walking around his hotel to show me what it looked like. Remember: He was using iChat on a PowerBook connected to the hotel's wireless network. He wasn't just video enabled, he was mobile. And what I was seeing were live images with narration beamed across cyberspace at near-television speeds, with nearly film quality. If Dan's photojournalism of the Sunset Strip left something to be desired, the possibility that individuals equipped with modest tools will soon be able to transmit live video feeds from wherever they are left me mulling the many possibilities hours later.

The Future

We can already take photographs with our cell phones. Surely, it won't be long before we'll be able to record short movies or video answering machine messages too. A mobile version of iChat AV built into a 3G cell phone or a dedicated wireless chatting device could be an extraordinary means for helping travelers, students, and military personnel stay in touch with their families or the home office, for reducing the need to travel in an increasingly dangerous world, or for helping us better understand other lives and other cultures.

I could envision a whole suite of software and services building up around video chat. How useful would it be to chat face to face with an eBay seller before placing a bid? Or to have the ability to jointly browse items in a wedding registry while discussing the items face to face with your significant other? There's no reason that an iChat AV video stream couldn't one day incorporate a news ticker, couldn't let you talk one on one with your favorite TV talk show hosts, couldn't allow you, in San Francisco, to watch a concert performance in London with a friend in Brazil. The possibilities are endless.

Drawbacks

Yes, the future looks bright for video chatting in both its current form and in future incarnations, especially the mobile ones. But first, such technologies need to achieve market penetration and, so far, that's the biggest drawback of Apple's experiment with iChat AV and iSight. Lots of people own both the software and the camera, yet few of those consumers are likely to be close friends of yours. Granting that a number of iChat AV communities have sprung up to help bring video chatters together, you'd probably still prefer to talk to people you already know.

To borrow a phrase from William Gibson, "the future has arrived—it's just unevenly distributed."

To fully realize its new technology, Apple needs to get iChat AV and iSight into broadband equipped enterprises and institutions. If I were an Apple marketing guru, I'd evangelize the technology by giving iSight cameras to colleges and universities for practically nothing to accustom students to using them. I'd give iSight cameras to the military in Iraq so soldiers in the field could communicate with loved ones back home. I'd put iSight bars into Apple stores around the world so Mac users in one store could talk to Mac users in another. I'd consider bundling the iSight with high-end desktop and portable machines simply to saturate the market with the technology and fuel consumer demand.

I'd also offer new ways for internet users to embed live iChat video images and online presence indicators into their web pages. In Mac OS X Panther, Apple took baby steps in the latter direction by integrating presence detection into OS X applications. Mail and Address Book, for example, both show when a Buddy of yours is online—but online presence as used to date falls far short of a truly effective, intuitive, and useful way to manage email, instant messaging, contacts, and voice communications in the Mac OS.

Much good work has been done, but much remains. We consumers must be patient and wait for video chatting technologies to evolve and mature. But the good news is that our patience may soon be rewarded.

I have seen the future, and it is us.