Realtime video chats

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Realtime video chats

Postby fusordoug » Sun Jun 10, 2012 4:10 pm

I've recently joined up on google plus to use the "hangouts" feature, which lets up to 9 people have a video conference call in real time. It's pretty cool when the right people are involved, such as perhaps, the people here. Our newest member, Colin, and I will be starting a "public" hangout tonight (Jun 10) at 7 pm or thereabouts EST USA time, so anyone with a working webcam setup and a google plus account can join. Tonight we're going to do a lab walkaround and a demo fusor run, as mentioning this on other hangouts got a lot of interest. But in general - you guys living on opposite sides of the planet from one another ought to get into this and take advantage of *free* "phone" conversations - we can finally see one another on, not quite as good as face to face, but pretty good. I'm on there as myself, Doug Coulter (google like real names), and the first time you want to join a hangout, they'll want you to install a plug in - which works great for me here on linux and others on windows. It does take a reasonably quick computer if there are all 9 possible people chatting or you drop out or freeze video...but that's not too horrible a limitation - most modern laptops will do it, all my desktops do fine.

All are encouraged to join up on google plus and add me to your "circles" or vice versa so we can know when we are online chatting. Nice to be able to just hold something up to the camera for someone to see, it's a lot less work than taking a picture an uploading it and so forth - and we can doodle, share screenshots (and those are also real time video - for example, when I walk away, I put up a slideshow). It's pretty cool, I'm a newb at this myself, but it would be great for some of us to finally get to talk...

Hey, I wasn't kidding - some of us will never meet face to face any other way...
Bonus - there are a ton of engineers and artists.

Just not enough scientists (there aren't that many of us).
For example, spoke with this guy and his wife the other night (will he give me lessons? Holy cow!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oVzB0zRBU0
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
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fusordoug
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