Tag: videochat

Hooray! Videochat is working!

So after loads of work and testing, we now have a VideoChat app for OLPC that really works 🙂 Check it out! It is a core part of a trial I’m working on, which isn’t quite yet public news, but more on that soon.

Many thanks to Stephen Thorne for his wonderful efforts and the enormous amount of time he’s put into making it work. Also thanks of course to the Collabora guys who made it in the first place. VideoChat could do with more work, more UI hacking, work on the “whiteboard” functionality idea, and potentially a way to create multi-conferencing, so if you want to hack, get hacking on VideoChat. More details and the download are on the OLPC VideoChat page.

Please note, this app currently only does basic videoconferencing (between 2 laptops only atm) and not the wonderful but still in planning whiteboard functionality on the Videochat webpage.

VideoChat – OLPC Activity

I am working on a really interesting OLPC XO/XS trial (all to be revealed soon!) where the main lynchpin demonstration is the VideoChat activity. We are certainly looking at the educational benefits, the interesting impact on truancy, and opportunities for disadvantaged kids, etc. However, the VideoChat offers a great way to provide support to remote kids including speech therapy, behavioural therapy, counselling, health services and of course distance education. So we have been working hard to get the VideoChat activity working. It now works online, but not with an XS (unless you disable Squid and have no firewall), so more work to go.

Anyway, I temporarily uploaded the xo to my website knowing I wanted to have it hosted elsewhere fairly quickly. Luckily one of the wonderful Telepathy guys (hi Cassidy!) offered to host it, so it’s all good. Thing is, in the 3 days I was hosting the 8mb file, I had 534 downloads. Woohoo! That is a lot of bandwidth in a very short time 🙂 I guess it is of interest to a lot of folk out there.

Check out VideoChat. It is very cool but it still needs a lot of work including some prettying up!

Anyway, this is a short one. I have several blogs to catch up on, so sorry everyone!