Video comments, seeing and being

June 18, 2007

Video comments, seeing and being

Loic Le Meur twittered that Dennis Howlett had left a useful video comment regarding LeWeb 3. There's Dennis looking like he just got out of bed, tousled hair, eyes heavy, wearing a vest (well it's probably warm in Andalucia), looking all relaxed and natural on camera. Towards the end of the video he mentions the multi-party video conferencing system -- Viper Room -- that Marjolein Hoekstra is playing around with over at Clever Clogs.

Of course I've know Marjolein for ages so I ping her on Google Talk while watching her live video stream. She tells me that she's also been broadcasting images from her webcam using a Skype add-on called Avacon which sends out a stream of stills through her avatar. But I express how completely different that is in my opinion, psychologically, to live streaming video.

I remind her that the most interesting experience I ever had in terms of 'telepresence' was about a year ago when my business partner in the States, picked up her webcam and started walking around the room with it. I told her turn left... she tured left.... I said turn right..... she turned right...... I said look up... she looked up. Then... I saw the dog sleeping on the floor... I whistled loudly and the dog lifted his head. That was incredible. Even though the video quality was only average I almost felt like I was there. It was like I was floating around in her house... disembodied. That was the moment I decided that teleprescense would be huge. But I think people don't really appreciate how powerful it is unless they've been through a pyschological threshold like that..... it's so amazingly different to just looking at a face from a single angle on a webcam. It's like the difference between looking at the TV and looking out a window. The difference between seeing and being.