Last night for about two hours, with under twenty min­utes notice, four peo­ple com­mu­ni­cated aurally and simultaneously(ish) watched and could inter­act with the same screen.

VoIP (using Skype on Linux) wasn’t play­ing nice, so we wound up using a PSTN, with the phone at the remote end (remote to me, any­way) hooked into a sound con­sole with three micro­phones patched in (as well as com­puter audio, but that doesn’t bear men­tion­ing!) for each par­tic­i­pant. Using VNC (I’d have pre­ferred to use MS RDC, but that doesn’t allow mul­ti­ple simul­ta­ne­ous users on one ses­sion), we col­lab­o­ra­tively worked on a web­site design in Pho­to­shop simul­ta­ne­ously from oppo­site ends of Sydney.

Sure, it helps that one end was a sound stu­dio, and that both ends were using real — as opposed to 256 or 512k “broadband” — broadband… but that just goes to prove even more firmly how much tech­nol­ogy rocks!