Skype Video Call
July 14th, 2005Tonight I made a video phone call, the first of my life. I called Helen, my daughter. It was also her first video call. Only thing is, she’s 4 and I’m 37.
We used Skype with the add-on software VSkype, plus a pair of very cheap web cams that I bought today at RadioShack.
Unfortunately, the computer at Helen’s house lacks a microphone, and so do the cheap web cams I bought (that must be a reason they were two for $30). Thus we had no sound. But the call went through and carried low-resolution, live images. We used mobile phones for audio. Not perfect, but it was a successful experiment.
Video conferencing through Skype is easy to set-up and use. Now that I’ve learned how to do it, it should be just as easy to do a China-to-US call as it was to do a call within Maryland today.