Video Chat In Gmail

Google announced a cool new feature in Gmail -- voice and video chat right from within your browser. It does require you to install a plugin though. It does work on the Mac, yup. However, the plugin installation requires you to close all your browsers. Don't say we didn't warn you.

The video chat is also available for Google Apps customers who use Gmail. You could click on a contact name in Gmail and it would pop up a small window to begin a chat session. In the 'Options' link in that window, you can find a link to enable video chat. This could be quite useful for businesses where employees are spread out geographically and would sometime like to have a face to face conversation with another fellow employees.

Here is a video from a guy in Gmail team, explaining the virtues of voice and video chat:

The Vidyo Technology

The plugin is about 2MB and incorporates technology from Vidyo which is basically an implementation of a new streaming video standard called the H.264/SVC standard. The company claims to handle good quality video transmission even over lossy "well known" network connections.

And here is a video demonstrating the handling of quality of the video when the network starts getting congested and the packet losses start increasing. There is no sound in the video.

Wishing good luck to Gmail team for a steady growth in usage of voice and video chat!