Wonders of working remotely
30 Jun 2005Last 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!