Wed, 31 May 2006
The other Iva
A week ago, I wrote about using Ekiga as a
videophone. Iva found another interesting way to use Ekiga - as a toy for
Iva. We call the remote echo test (ekiga.net has
sip:500@ekiga.net test number), enable the video loopback,
and put the audio to the speakers.
Iva gets extremely excited when she sees and hears herself (with a little
delay) in the softphone. She yells "Hello, Iva!" to the microphone, and waves
to the picture of herself. I think that because of the latency and because
usually people hear themselves in a different tone when they are speaking
than when the recording of their voice is being played back, she probably
thinks that the girl in the picture is not herself. I hereby appologize to
ekiga.net for abusing their bandwidth :-)
Anyway, I think the video telephony is definitely useful - now I can see my family even when I am at work. The only problem is that the picture of myself (which I have to display in order to stay in the viewing angle of the camera) it is pretty confusing: The image is displayed in a straight way, while my brain probably expects to see myself in a flipped image like in a mirror. So staying in the picture is difficult even with a visual feedback - I often move myself to the opposite side than I need to.