So, I know that all of your Mac users (blech!) might not be excited but I am. I finally went out and bought a web cam for my laptop. It’s a tiny Creative Live! Ultra for Notebooks camera and I have to say, so far I’m impressed. It comes with a few great features that I never thought I’d use (and I might still never touch).
First, the quality is fine for me. I wasn’t looking for an HD quality web cam (if they even make those yet) but I was looking for something that I could easily record content on Viddler, YouTube, etc and this one surely does that. It comes with a feature called “multi-person Smart Face-Tracking”. This is quite a feature. I was skeptical of how it would work at first but after trying it out a bit I see it could come in very handy. It tracks multiple people as they move about the room making sure to keep the people with faces in the picture (the ones without usually creep me out anyway).
While playing around with the camera today I’ve found a couple of things that this will be very helpful with that I didn’t realize before. Besides the fact that I can now video blog and record short videos to send off to friends and family, I can also video chat with my family and friends that live too far away to see often. I figured I would use something like Skype Video, SightSpeed or PalTalk (all of which I’ve tried in the past) but I happened upon TokBox. TokBox is probably one of the simplest sites I’ve found and it provides me with one of the greatest features it could have… Flash-based video conferencing and chat. I can quickly and easily send out my personal link to someone over IM or email and they can join in on a video chat with me (I can’t imaging who would want to) without registration or downloading any software. They even support multi-party chats. I’ll definitely be using this service more in the near future. For now, below is an embedded applet to let you chat with me or send me a video mail if you’re so inclined.
Get your own TokBox at www.tokbox.com.
