Donovan's Brain

A few of us at work are alpha testing the PAL PS2 version of EverQuest. It lacks voice chat, unlike SOCOM, so Andy had the bright idea of using the voice chat feature of the latest version of Apple’s iChat.

But then I came across the clever hack that allows you to use USB webcams, rather than Firewire cameras, to do video conferencing in iChat. Andy had a spare camera at work so I borrowed it, and a couple of hours and one false start later Andy popped into view on my iBook. OK, so he’s only down the road (in worldwide terms) in Harlow, but it was still pretty cool. In the end we were connected for two hours while Andy and James played EverQuest (due to technical problems I couldn’t play). My iBook was running off its battery and using a wireless network connection and it still had 45 minutes of battery life left when the chat ended. Pretty cool eh?

One thing that confused me that night was that when I was trying to give a virtual tour of our house (well, it seemed fun at the time), the preview image that sits in the corner of the video window was showing a picture flipped around the X axis, like looking in the mirror. It made it hard to describe the position of things in the picture, but I can see why Apple did it. iChat AV is supposed to be used with the camera pointing at the user. If they wave at the camera with their left hand, it would make most sense to them to see a hand waving on the left of the preview image (just like in a mirror), even though that would appear to be their right hand that was waving. Or perhaps it’s just a bug?