Linas, Molly and I tested out ooVoo tonight from our respective homes. I was connected via my wireless router hooked up to Comcast cable internet. The ABA program is using ooVoo for the Virtual Practicum course. It is a videoconferencing solution that features the following with a paid account: 6-way video chatting (paid desktop client to 5 un-paid web-based clients). The nice thing about using the paid account to generate a URL for non-members to use has definite advantages of ease-of-use and no client software installation. The browsers require Java and I’m sure there are minimum system requirements, but I doubt they’ll be a problem for the participating students.
When we first logged on, Linas sent Molly and I a URL to call his standard (unpaid) account. We fooled around with the settings and eventually had four computers connected (I had two on my side). The quality was awful to put it bluntly. Linas only had two bars on the video quality scale. We couldn’t figure it out since we both did network speed tests and found we had more than enough bandwidth.
In a last-ditch effort, I opened my desktop client using one of Ed Donovan’s paid accounts (psumi15) and generated a URL to share with Linas. The difference was night and day. We were able to chat normally and declared the test a success! I was even able to share my desktop with them, but the frame rates were pretty low (1-4 fps). I wasn’t able to send any files or text chat with them, but that’s not suprising given that they were connected via their web browsers. Twice, the video from my second laptop dropped out, but it only lasted for a second or two.
So, I think Dr. David Lee’s course should go well (knock on wood) as long as he has a paid account and no more than five students to chat with at one time.
Here’s a snapshot of the three of us chatting away: