iChat Realism
The WWDC keynote has come and gone, and there are a lot of really cool things. Personally, I’m trying to decide which of my organs might be worth $3,800 that I could sell for a 30” Cinema Display. Actually, I’d probably need another $3,000 for a G5 to plug it in to. And since that’s pushing seven thousand dollars, I might as well tack on another three, so that I can have a dual-monitor setup. I think ten grand would be a reasonable price for a desktop of over eight million pixels.
Looking over the Apple site, I noticed the screenshot of the new multi-person video chat in iChat AV. I guess when you’ve got dual G5s running at 2.5GHz, there are cycles to throw at things like image reflections. But the question I really want answered is this:
Does iChat AV order the chat participants in a coherent fashion such that each participant sees the other participants in the same relative place?
If it does, glancing right and left to look directly at each person on screen would look to the other participants as if your icon is looking at the appropriate icon for the person you are addressing.
That would be exceptionally cool.
Comments
Actually, it requires a lot less intelligence than you think. It could be as simple as sorting people alphabetically, and displaying clockwise. It’s a relatively simple task, but one that some companies might overlook. I suspect, however, that Apple has already thought about this issue, and dealt with it.
Posted by: kasei on June 29th, 2004 12:52 AMWhile I was at Cambridgeside earlier today waiting for the picture people to unscrew-up my pictures(took them 3 hours) I wandered into the Apple Store. The first thought I had after walking into that Den of evil was how giddy you’d be if you were there too…
Just for the record, the second thought that went through my head was “Could I get that with Windows instead?”
Posted by: Matthew on June 29th, 2004 10:08 PMI guess that just means I expect computers, like their human counterparts to be less smart than they actually are. That way I’m always impressed when they aren’t completely moronic.
Posted by: sara on June 29th, 2004 11:39 PMit seems from the picture that each person is looking straight ahead and its the “angle” of the frame that makes each appear to be looking at some centered point. i assume this would be an easy way to skirt the issue.
Posted by: shuli on July 3rd, 2004 7:08 PMTrue. If the window was small enough, everyone would essentially be looking straight ahead. But imagine using it full-screen on one of the new 23” or 30” monitors, where there might be nearly two feet of horizontal distance between the people on the left and right. That would surely show up as a glance to the side for everyone else to see.
Posted by: kasei on July 3rd, 2004 7:58 PMdont get me wrong, i think your way is neater and more realistic, just that by the pic it doesnt quite look like apple has done such.
Posted by: shuli on July 5th, 2004 8:30 PM
God.. that would require a hell of a lot of intellegence on the computer’s part, to know what the other computers are displaying and such.
Exceptionally cool, exceptionally difficult (to my mind at least).
I’m sure that I’ll be able to drop ten grand on a computer someday.. after I marry someone who has or makes buckets of money, cause I’m sure as hell never going to make any as a journalist.
Posted by: sara on June 28th, 2004 11:58 PM