E-mail is ready to go visual as the 21st century approaches
ORDINARY postal services, now commonly referred to as 'snail mail', took a
back seat with the advent of electronic
or e-mail. Users with e-mail facility
prefer to by-pass the various irritating
hurdles 'snail mail' is prone to with a
single key-stroke on their computers.
But in this age of faster-than-eye
technological progress, when even the
'latest' computers begin to embarrass
the technically-inclined in less than
a year, a system that promises to make
e-mails obsolete is all set to make its
debut among computer whiz-kids and
technology buffs.
This latest gizmo that all computer
freaks are swearing by is video e-mail,
dubbed v-mail. It is a system that
will allow a user to send short video
messages by e-mail to another via the
Internet. The Dutch electronics giant
Philips recently unveiled their low-cost
v-mail system called Videogram.
Videogram comprises a simple colour
video camera with an in-built micro-phone that plugs into a universal serial
bus socket on a Windows 98 personal
computer (PC) (Electronics, Vol 112, No 234).
Using a software package called the
Videogram Creator, users simply
have to click on icons to control
the camera and hit the 'Esc' button
to stop recording. Clicking on the
'send' icon compresses the usual
AVI (video for the Windows format)
recording by a factor of 100, so
that a minute-long audio-visual message can be stored on the regular
1.4-megabyte floppy. The compressed
file can then be sent as an ordinary
e-mail message.
Previous V-mail systems only worked
if the recipient, too, had matching
software to decode the sound-and-video
file, Philips, however, bundles matching
playback software with the message and
packs it as a small executable (.exe) file.
Fortunately, the playback software
is compatible with any Windows
version. "V-mail will replace e-mail in
four to five years," predicts a Philips
spokesperson. The Videogram package
from Philips is currently available
for US $99.
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