Way back when Apple announced iChat AV and the iSight, Kevin had the idea of using them to give guitar lessons online, potentially over significant distances. After talking about it for ages (my fault!), we finally got around to giving it a try last Sunday, and I'm pleased to report that it worked remarkably well. Comfortably situated at home in San Mateo, California, I enjoyed an hour and a half of expert instruction from a member of the Seattle Guitar Quartet who was holed up in his own studio, over 800 miles away.

The technical challenges I expected to encounter — trouble seeing fingering and notation clearly, upstream bandwidth limits of our DSL/cable connections, sound latency, difficulty finding workable voice and instrument audio levels — were all there to some extent, but were much less acute and troublesome than I had been prepared to have to deal with. Certainly what problems do exist seem to be surmountable. You get used to thinking about whether what you're doing needs to be clearly visible, and adjusting your position relative to the camera when necessary. Jamming is a bit of a challenge with about a half-second delay in each direction, but the delay doesn't seem to be a problem for the alternating back-and-forth playing that makes up most of a lesson. Very solid audio quality helped make up for the network-limited (and on my end CPU-limited) video feed. It will be interesting to see how things improve in the latter department, with the new and reportedly more bandwidth-efficient H.264/AVC codec that's been announced for Tiger. (A further interesting possibility that Tiger iChat may facilitate: group lessons via multi-way video chat!)

Coming someday: Blues jam at 35,000 feet?  :-)