It beats me why anyone would wish to transmit live images of their most intimate moments to a voyeuristic world. Personal webcam sites have exploded on to the internet and none more so than the ubiquitous "girlcams". But having recently moved to the other side of the globe, I, too, have jumped on the webcam bandwagon.
Webcams offer a wealth of possibilities, from entertaining friends with stand-up comedy, to monitoring your dog while at work. I was interested purely in the webcam's video conferencing capability as an antidote to homesickness. For what better way to keep up with the family back home than to drop in to their living room for unlimited chats without worrying about my phone bill? No wonder so many people here in Australia have acquired this inexpensive piece of technology for staying in touch with relatives overseas.
I paid less than £50 for a Logitech QuickCam Web, which comes with a built-in microphone and all the software you need. For video calling, you need a webcam at both ends and, ideally, a fast internet connection and full duplex sound card. The compact unit, designed to perch on a monitor, seemed an ingenious birthday present for my distant mother. It also promised to be a great investment guaranteed to pay for itself in phone bill savings in a couple of leisurely online reunions.
With our children geared up for a live rendition of happy birthday, we requested our first net meeting. A few moments later, we landed in my brother's living room in Sussex and our geographically separated families could see each other for the first time in more than a year. We all huddled around the monitor and squinted at the images that filled much less than a quarter of our 19-inch screen. But fiddle as we might with our microphones and software, we could not hear a thing at either end. We waved and gesticulated wildly, actions that appeared as delayed jumpy movements that froze rather comically on several occasions. Finally, after a frustrating hour on the phone to each other (rather defeating the cost-cutting objective), we sorted the audio glitch by disabling our firewalls.
"Hello, can you hear us?" we chorused excitedly from both ends. A long pause followed because we were talking over the top of each other. When all was quiet, we tried another tack. "Let's say 'over' when we've finished speaking. Over". Pause. "OK", came the reply with the "over" omitted. Another two-second pause, then both ends tried speaking again in unison. The much-rehearsed happy birthday performance was lost in the mix.
The two-second delay in the audio has proved a real conversation killer, particularly for get-togethers involving three generations. Logitech's support system helpfully pointed out that we were using the webcam to bridge a huge distance. "You may see some delays, and the voice will probably not exactly coincide with the video." Too true, but we soon eliminated distance as the main cause of the delay. We made a number of calls to different destinations but the audio delay was roughly the same: two seconds to London, two seconds to Hong Kong and darn near two seconds to just around the corner.
I telephoned other webcam owners to swap experiences. "The voice and video are OK on their own, but a bit dodgy together," said one user, who relied on the webcam for vision but the phone for voice. A more enthusiastic advocate said that he and his family have learned to anticipate when someone is about to finish speaking and launch a reply before the delay kicks in. "It does take a bit of getting used to but you don't need to revert to CB talk. We can hold a reasonable conversation even on a dialup modem."
The Microsoft NetMeeting video call software is free to download at www.microsoft.com/windows/netmeeting. Expensive video conferencing software may do the job better, but the beauty of the webcam package is that it is wonderfully affordable, making video conferencing accessible to home users for the first time.
In spite of getting our wires crossed, the opportunity for my mother to see her grandchildren was a wonderful birthday surprise. Our children were also thrilled to be reunited with grandma's dog and their cousins' cat. As for chatting, we've found we can exchange more information over the phone in 10 minutes than we can in an hour of internet chat. But who cares? It's fun and, with our cable connection, it's free.
