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Video Conferencing

On this page:

• Guests
• For Your Files

Businesses have been doing it for years, and you can too! We'll show you what you need and how it's done.

Guests

Lance Cunningham

Lance Cunningham

Lance Cunningham has been an information technology design specialist with Digital Media Center, a unit of the Office of Information Technology (OIT) at the University of Minnesota since receiving his B.S. in scientific and technical communication from the University in 2002. He consults with faculty members about using digital video and audio for educational purposes. He also plays bass for the band Morningtide and is actively involved in the local music scene.

Dave Farmer

Dave Farmer

Dave Farmer is a senior network design engineer and lead of the network design team for the Networking & Telecommunications Services unit of OIT at the University of Minnesota. He is the technical lead for the University's Internet2 projects and related activities, including the Northern Lights GigaPOP service. He attended the University of Minnesota.

For Your Files

Dave Farmer, a design engineer at the U, explained videoconferening: "Think of it as a telephone with pictures to start with. You talk to someone and . . . see them at the same time. Basically, as we had said, you take a picture and you turn it into digital information: bits (ones and zeros). And those are sent across the Internet or across the special . . . digital phone line to the other end. And you take both the video and the audio portion of the signal and send them across."

Dave feels there are definite advantages to using videoconferening: "What the videoconference delivers is body language and other things that, when you're talking maybe a contract negotiation for millions of dollars, . . . knowing when somebody is looking concerned [is important]. That's not something you hear on the telephone. Body language and the emotional context is an important piece."

Lance Cunningham, technology specialist, gave us the details about what we'll need in order to do videoconferencing from our home computer: "Basically any computer that was purchased in the last couple years is definitely more than enough than is needed. The biggest thing [you need] is a decent video card and also a sound card to handle the audio. To do video conferencing you need something to put video into the computer so you are going to want a video camera of some sort."

When purchasing a webcam, Lance says there are differences between the low and high cost models: "The difference between the $20 versions and the ones closer to $100 is usually sometimes the resolution isn't quite as good. You'll have a little more pixilated image, a little more choppy [and] a little more grainy [appearance], or the light response might not be quite as good so you might not have as accurate color. Some of the other differences: some of the cheaper ones don't have built in cameras."

Lance said there is a wide variety of software available for videoconferencing, some of which is free. However, "almost all videoconferencing software requires that you be using the same software."