No sooner had we baptized our little Logitech 3000 Pro Webcam with Spotlife support, we decided it was time to use it for doing video chats.

This time the software was from Eyeball, a youthful entry into the videophone realm. We had tried to gear up for a chat on Microsoft NetMeeting right after the Logitech arrived, but became hopelessly tangled in all of the ancillary downloads and signing-ups that it required and wound up with nothing more than a new Hotmail account filling up with spam.

What we were looking for was a switch-on and go affair, and that's what we got in Eyeball. We went to the site, signed up, and were up and running with the program in minutes. After poking around to find out what all the bells and whistles did, we rang up Angie Hirata, Eyeball's Marketing Communications Specialist at their home office in Vancouver and there she was, looking right back at us, eyeball to eyeball. Comments Angie:

"We believe that Internet video communication hasn't reached the mainstream due to two major barriers: quality and ease of use. With the proprietary technology developed by Eyeball.com that constantly monitors each user's bandwidth to optimize the video quality, each user - narrowband or broadband - receives the best possible quality. Moreover, with our simple interface, people can log on from any computer (Contact List information is stored on the server, not the hard drive), find people to chat with, and don't even need to know their IP address."

After our losing struggle with Microsoft's approach, we couldn't agree more. This kind of thing shouldn't be a problem - it should be point and shoot, and Eyeball definitely does that. You get an on-screen monitor for your own image, and another for the person you're talking to. You can talk into the camera mic or, to avoid feedback, use a headset. Then you just, well, chat. Depending on 'Net traffic, you may get a little delay and have to pause while signals get there and back, but that's the worst of it. The frame rate is a trifle slow, but it's designed to be able to operate at 56k, and you have adjustable frame speed and picture and audio quality controls, so you can make a choice of what to sacrifice at whatever speed you're rolling at.

But to begin at the beginning, here's how it goes: