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I’m interjecting a post between Part II and Part III of “Extension Tubes in Macro Photography.” I’ll post Part III by Monday.
Using ooVoo (www.ooVoo.com) we had three-way video chatting tonight. L to R: Jeff and his better half, Jon and Claire, and me. We'll use ooVoo for the remote Internet wedding shower on Sunday. (Click photo to enlarge.)
Jon and Claire (my nephew and his bride) from Michigan are getting married in April. I thought it would be a fun family time to host a shower for them in Iowa. However, schedules didn’t match up. Hmmm…what to do? There must be some outside-the-box way to pull off a shower.
I talked with Jon’s mom, my next older sister, who is always game for fun, and pulled ideas from the guy at the Apple store and Jon’s brother, Josh. Bingo! We decided to have a “remote” Internet shower. I’m sure we aren’t the first ones in the wide world doing this, but in our immediate worlds we are!
What we will do is video chat across the Internet. At each location there will be a computer that, at minimum, can handle one-way live video streaming for watching Jon and Claire open gifts. When an observing location’s computer has a built-in or attached camera so that the remote participants can also be viewed via streaming video…the bonus will be two-way streaming video chatting (or three-way, four-way, or more).
Jon and Claire and their parents will be at Jon’s parents’ home in Michigan. Bill and I will be at our Perry, Iowa, home with at least part of the Gunderson family from Rolfe and Omaha. Additional branches of Jon’s extended family will participate in clusters via cyberspace reaching from Florida to Oregon.
Jeff (Jon’s dad) is the designated IT guy for this shower. Before the shower, Jeff is calling the contact person for each participating location to make sure the contact knows how to connect via the Internet to the shower. When Jeff called me tonight, he led me through the simple steps of two-way video chat using ooVoo (www.oovoo.com…I keep accidentally calling it “Voodoo.”) OoVoo is always free for two-way video chatting. Video chatting via ooVoo with up to six other people simultaneously is available for a fee.
By downloading the ooVoo software, I have more options than if I don’t download the software. However, ooVoo may be used satisfactorily without downloading the software.
While Jeff and I were video chatting tonight as he was leading me through some steps/options, Jeff “invited” Jon (who was at his own home) to video chat with us as well. It just happened that Claire was in the vicinity of Jon, and my sister was in the vicinity of Jeff. Being the silly goons that we are, Jon, Jeff and I each got out a camera and simultaneously took a photo of the computer monitor in front of us (i.e., the photo at the top of this post).
Sometime after the shower I’ll report how it went, either by commenting on this post, or by adding a separate post.
(Click here to go to Louise Shimon’s blog’s home page.)
Tags: bridal shower, Internet, online, ooVoo, video chat, video conferencing, wedding shower
Marion Gunderson Art (and the Farmer's Daughter) 
March 5, 2010 at 10:59 am |
How fun! And what amazing technology! Technology I *imagined* when I was little but thought impossible. Why . . . it’s VOODOO!!! Hehe–loved that one, Louise. 🙂
March 5, 2010 at 11:30 am |
Peggy, I know what you mean about imagining it when we were little. I remember being at Gunderland in my K-12 days thinking how miraculous it would be if I called someone and we could distantly see each other while we were talking. Like, yeah, that was never going to happen!
This morning I was on the phone for about 45 minutes with Qwest because we’ve been having intermittent problems with our Internet connection. The guy was asking me about cables and filters. To follow the cables, I had to keep standing up looking above the top of the desk, then go below the desk…up, down, up, down as I kept losing sight of the cables and therefore not being able to follow them to where the tech guy was asking me to look. One time I even had to stand on top of the desk to look at something at the very back of the desk (which was against the wall). This is all in my morning get-out-of-bed clothes/hair. The whole time I kept flashing back to last night and the video chatting, being so glad that the guy couldn’t see me. (But every once in awhile when I was in a compromising position and not feeling all that confident I had the fleeting wonder…with his special tech equipment/powers of being able to see details about our connection, etc., ***could*** he see me?!)