14 DAY TRIAL // Development for the iPhone has been coming along in leaps and bounds, but despite the progress made in this area, there were still certain applications that nobody expected to see, because of hardware limitations. iPhone hackers have proven once again that they are so resourceful that they can make the impossible happen, even if not in a very stylish way.
Video conferencing on the iPhone has always been regarded as an impossibility, simply because of the way the device's camera points in the wrong direction. While real third party application have come a long way and hackers have developed toolkits that make developing for the iPhone as easy as developing for the Mac, the hardware limitation was something that was always taken as a given.
Glen Aspeslagh was part of a two man team that entered the 'Iron Coder Live' contest at the C-4 developer conference. Their entry was nothing less than a two way video conference on the iPhone. "Our contest entry captures video from the iPhone's camera, compresses it, and sends it to a web server, where it's relayed to another iPhone, and vice-versa, resulting in a nice two-way video conference. Need audio too? That's not our department but simply make a phone call to the other person's iPhone and put them on speaker phone. Then fire up our program and you're in business," Aspeslagh blogs.
Of course, while the software details of the video conference were not too much trouble with the tool available today, the hardware limitation was still there. In order to get past it, the two turned to a home-made solution? a periscope like add-on for the iPhone. The contraption allows the camera image to be reflected off of two acrylic mirrors, the end result being processed and re-orientated by the software. Despite it not winning any points for style or good looks, the solution does work quite nicely.