Eye On CameraWare -- feature

Written by: Alynna

1962 The Jetsons debut on television; Cosmo G. Spacely is the first to utilize video conferencing on a regular basis to check on employee George Jetson. Mr. Spacely set the standards for what would become a technological quest. Before we could enjoy videoconferencing for what it is today, we had several hurdles to leap. First, we had to develop a way to connect people by a physical means, then we had to create the technology to do it and lastly, make it cost efficient to use on a wide scale. It has been a very long, difficult road.

The first serious effort at being able to see images LIVE across the span of miles was in 1964 when AT&T introduced Picture phone at the World’s Fair in New York. Because the Internet had not been invented yet, all videoconferencing platforms were restricted to telephones and giant, huge machines to transmit the images. It was bulky, expensive and still not ready for use but it was a good start.

The Picture phone was made available by AT&T to the general public 6 years later, in 1970. Compression Labs was next to follow but not for another 12 years. In 1982 Compression Labs begins selling $250,000 VC system, $1,000 per hour lines. Close on their heels in 1986, PictureTel introduces an $80,000 videoconferencing system, with cut-rate hourly rates of $100 per hour. The moving images were nice, but it was still too expensive for the average consumer and the machinery was still extremely large.

In 1987, Mitsubishi exploded onto the market with their $1,500 still picture phone but Mitsubishi dropped the entire project only two years later. People wanted moving images and low cost was no substitute. In 1991 PictureTel unveils $20,000 black-and-white VC system, $30 per hour lines and later that same year, hooked up with IBM to demonstrate videoconferencing on a PC. Things were evolving from the telephone lines and bulky stand-alone machinery, becoming more cost effective with every development.

During this time, the Internet was being born. In 1991, a trans-continental IP network of about a dozen research sites were connected by T1 trunks and DARTnet was born. DARTnet was an Internet connecting brilliant minds from around the world and giving them a platform to test their ideas. In August of 1991, UCB Lawrence Berkely National Laboratories released an audio tool for use on DARTnet. 1991 Dec: DVC (receive-only) program, by Paul Milazzo from BBN, IETF meeting, Santa Fe. This demonstration inspired Tim Dorcey to create CUSeeMe. In 1992 AT&T's $1,500 videophone for home market and the next July, MBone emerged on the market. This program eventually became available on the market under the name of Picture Window. 1991 and 1992 were exceptionally important years for the advancement of video conferencing, and the best was yet to come.

In September of 1992, CU-SeeMe for Macintosh (without audio), by Tim Dorcey from Cornell. You can read the actual email exchange between Tim Dorcey and Dick Cogger discussing the development of CUSeeMe: http://myhome.hananet.net/~soonjp/cuorg.txt
Until this point, video conferencing required expensive hardware to transmit the signal, Knowing that people could not afford $1500 to talk to their friends, Dorcey took a more conventional approach by using a ‘reflector’ or hub. The broadcaster’s image would be sent via IP to the Reflector, then the image would be reflected to the recipient.

Things skyrocketed from this point on. CU-SeeMe became the standard by which many videoconferencing packages would be fashioned after. In February of 1994, CU-SeeMe for Macintosh (with audio), audio code by Charley Kline's Maven was released and the CU-SeeMe for Windows (without audio), by Steve Edgar from Cornell was released in April of 1994, audio for CUSeeMe would wait until August of 1995. . Hopping on the videoconferencing bandwagon was 1995 Feb: Vocaltec Internet Phone v1.0 for Windows, except they only had voice, not video. Also missing the ‘video’ in videoconferencing was Microsoft NetMeeting v1.0 (without video), released in August of 1996. They figured out video by December of the same year and released Microsoft NetMeeting v2.0b2 (with video). On December 15, 1997, Cybration Inc. of Corpus Christi, Texas announces ICUII. The actual press release can be seen here: http://www.3dlinks.com/spectrum/issues/spectrum-dec-15-97.cfm. In April of 1998, Cornell releases CU-SeeMe v1.0 for Windows and Macintosh (with color video), then one month later, Cornell's CU-SeeMe development team has completed their work and has gone on to other projects.

September 1st, 2000 marked the debut of CameraWare. After only 6 months, CameraWare has over 33,000 daily viewers watching over 2,500 cameras! ...and...this is just the beginning...

In 1962, the creators of the Jetsons envisioned video conferencing but could have had no idea how close to reality it really was. In the next issue of Eye On CameraWare, we will move our focus from the past to the future with a look at CameraWare. This column will feature an exclusive interview with the creator of CameraWare, MrDan.

A complete History of VideoConferencing can be found at: http://myhome.hananet.net/~soonjp/vchx.html