by Liu Nicholas

Created on: February 27, 2008

Web cameras or commonly know as Webcams is a very popular tool to enhance the communication between people. As a saying goes "A picture worth a thousand words", I believe a short video clip of your loved ones definitely worth a million.

Webcams are usually small cameras whose images and video clips can be accessed via using the world wide web, Internet web messaging software or video conferencing application. Most of the time they are use for live-feed video streaming, meaning the transmitter and the receiver are "live" together, watching and talking to each other in real time. There are often time lag between the transmission of the imaged captured by the transmitter and the receiver. This is because for streaming live video, the webcam is constantly capturing the image and transmitting out to the receiving end, this will produce large amount of network traffic which cause the lag. And to be able to successfully create a webcam connection, one must have, of course a webcam, and reasonable fast Internet or network connection and lastly a web cam application that would re-project the image capture on the webcam on to the computer or laptop top screen.

But no matter the limitation, webcam technologies are still very popular among people, especially for virtually bridging the distance between them. Using web-conferencing at the comfort of your own bedroom are gaining popularity and slowly substituting the common hang-out places. Friends could just turn on their webcam and the web-conferencing to create a virtual meet-up place, while they are chatting away, they could be also switching between different applications, doing a few things at a time.

But one must be aware that webcam should not replace your actual friend. What webcam can offer is only a live-feed video streaming between you and your friend(s). Probably you will only be able to see their faces and upper half of their body. Unless is the distance, do meet up with your friends. Virtual meet-up can never replace a actual physical meet-up with your friends, there are so much more things to see, feel and listen in the real world environment

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