14 DAY TRIAL // When they’re not fighting on whose products are better, Google and Microsoft are working together to make certain activities that we perform regularly a lot easier, and this is the case with a new project based on what’s being called Object Real-Time Communications API (ORTC).
Microsoft engineer Doug Mahugh has revealed today that Microsoft, Google, Hookflash, and others are working on a new real-time communications method for mobiles, tablets, and desktop devices, trying to make it easier for us to chat with each other without the need for third-party plugins.
At this point, video chatting in a browser is already possible, but only with the help of dedicated software that not only installs several files on our computers, but also sometime slows down the browser and thus has an impact on the overall performance we have when surfing the web.
Thanks to the new technology, we should be able to video chat without the need for any other plugins, Mahugh explains. It’s more like Skype without Skype, but all with the help of a modern browser.
“ORTC leverages JavaScript to enable plugin-free real-time communications among web browsers, mobile devices and cloud technologies in a way that is familiar to website developers,” he says.
The Microsoft engineer has also explained that this new technology perfectly matches Redmond’s new strategy because it is “well suited to a mobile first, cloud first” world, which is exactly what the new CEO Satya Nadella is hoping to get through a major reorganization of the company.
“The ORTC API is well suited to a ‘mobile first, cloud first’ world because it supports advanced video features such as scalable video coding and simulcast. These advanced video technologies have proven difficult to support in an interoperable way within SDP in WebRTC 1.0. By contrast, utilizing these advanced video technologies within a JavaScript object API is more straightforward,” he says.
Microsoft Open Technologies now hopes that more developers will implement this technology in their solutions and has even provided a prototype to get them going and show how everything could work out for them if they do decide to adopt the new communications method.
At this point, the tech is still in its very early stages, so it could take a while until we actually get to use it, but there’s no doubt that a collaboration between Google and Microsoft can only lead to very innovative ideas that could really have an impact on the way we do certain things on our computers.
Video chatting without plugins makes the web not only safer, but also faster, as no other software would be required to establish a connection between two persons.