iGlasses Helps iSight See

Anyone who buys an iMac or a MacBook gets a built-in iSight. Personally I think Apple is a tad ahead of the game with this one. Maybe Apple is trying to kick start the game. I don’t think video chat is so widespread that people must have a built-in iSight in their Mac. In fact, I reckon if you gave people a choice of built-in iSight and built-in TV tuner, they’d take the latter.

What is Apple up to with iSight? If you’ve ever planted a garden you’ll know it’s recommended to prepare the soil first, especially to fertilize it. I sense Apple is doing the same with the iSight. Is Apple planning a killer product that will leverage off the abundance of iSights out there? Are iSights the fertilizer enabling the rapid growth of some new product? And, of course, what is that new product? Will it be a video enabled iPhone?

But for the time being, we just have the iSight. A little black square staring you in the face, urging you to suck up internet bandwidth. Today I had my first video chat with it using Skype 2.0 beta and was reasonably impressed. I believe the person on the other end was even more impressed. She was using a PC and had a dodgy microphone and couldn’t do any clever tricks on the fly, like sepia, crazy colors, night vision, rotate, mirror and so on.

Of course it wasn’t Skype that gave me that ability. It was a must have utility for the iSight called iGlasses from Ecamm Network.

Features
iGlasses lets you - in real time - enhance the image iSight captures. It comes with several presets but also allows you to create your own using any combination of:
- Brightness
- Colorize
- Contrast
- Hue
- Night Time
- Saturation
- Sharpness
- Threshold
- White Balance

You can also mirror and rotate the image.

And again, these settings are applied in real time. They are not some sort of post-editing feature.

iGlasses’ most useful feature is of course that it can enhance the image iSight is capturing. In particular the white balance and brightness, two things that do need some help with most web cams. So whether day time (above) or night time (below), you can present yourself as a much healthier looking specimen of humankind on your iSight.

iGlasses supports many iSight enabled applications including:
- Skype 2.0 (beta)
- Photo Booth
- iMovie HD
- Yahoo Messenger
- Quicktime
and many more.

Wish List
With Core Video, it’d be cool if iGlasses extended the range of effects - something like Photo Booth. Imagine chatting to a friend on a PC and switching on twirl or pinch or pop art? I think they might just want to know what computer you are using.

The iSight has built-in automatic white balance adjustment. It’d be good if there was a way to over-ride this in iGlasses as it messes with your image, no matter how finely you’ve tuned iGlasses.

Overall
Really, why hasn’t Apple built something like iGlasses into OS X? At $8 it is an absolute steal. Based on what I’ve seen of utilities at the low end, iGlasses would be twice the price or more at many other vendors. Ecamm are to be congratulated for its excellent pricing, and not just on iGlasses, but all of its Mac applications. Here’s a quick list:

- Call Recorder (records Skype calls to QuickTime movies. Currently audio only as Skype with video calls is still in beta) $12.95
- Conference Recorder (records iChat AV audio and video calls to QuickTime movies) $14.95
- iChatter (adds voice synthesis to iChat) $8.00
- PowerBoost (makes multiparty video conferences possible on G4 macs) $8.00
- Drag’n'tooth (utility for easily installing files on to your Palm OS PDA or smartphone via Bluetooth) $9.95
- DockStar (adds up to 5 new-mail indicators to the dock icon) $8.00 (See Aaron Wright’s review here)
- iChatUSBCam (add-on for iChat AV which allows you to use a USB webcam for video conferencing. It also enables video conferencing on Macs which otherwise fall below Apple’s system requirements for conferencing.) $9.95

Check them out. (Ecamm also make Mac and Windows developer tools and applications for Palm handhelds.)

Considering its price, its usefulness, and its functionality, I am going to give iGlasses the full 10/10.