My daughter, home from college, plays Dungeons and Dragons. She is playing in a campaign over this summer with some college friends who happen to live in the area.
My son, who is now living in Charlottesville, used to play with these same people. But he’s two hours away now, too far to stop by for a nice little game of D&D on the weekend.
Enter technology. My son got himself a webcam yesterday. He’s going to play remotely – at his computer in Charlottesville while the group here in NoVa play near a webcam.
We did the test of this last night. The connection worked great. (Video over AIM has some problems in my house, for some reason. But Skype worked just fine.)
At around this time, I got an IM from my wife, who is in New York this week at an art seminar. She has a Macbook with her, with a built-in webcam. I IM’d her through installing Skype, and video IM’d with her from my Powerbook.
So, at one time, we had my son vid-conferencing from Charlottesville to my PC, while my wife was vid-conferencing from New York to my Powerbook. And here I was in the middle, seeing and talking to them both real-time.
What a wonderful world we live in!
Video over AIM stinks behind a firewall… From what I can tell, you need to enable TCP/UDP forwarding for:
443
1024-5000
5190
That works better in Trillian than AIM6, which continues to give me issues.