Collaborating with Codassium Image: codassium.com.

WebRTC is a proposed standard — currently being refined by the W3C — with the goal of providing a web-based set of tools that any device can use to share audio, video and data in real time. It’s still in the early stages, but WebRTC has the potential to supplant Skype, Flash and many native apps with web-based alternatives that work on any device.

Codassium uses WebRTC to bring together WebRTC-based video chat and Mozilla’s Ace code editor. The result is what Wreally Studios, creators of Codassium, call “a better way to conduct remote interviews.” Of course Codassium could be used for more than just interviews — think code reviews, remote pair programming or even just discussing code with remote employees.

To use Codassium you’ll need to be using a web browser that supports WebRTC — recent versions of Firefox and Chrome will both work. Head on over to Codassium, click the Start button and allow the site to access your camera and microphone. Once the video chat and Ace editor load, just click the Invite button and send the resulting link to the person you’d like to work with.

WebRTC blasts off. Image: Tsahi Levent-Levi/Flickr.

WebRTC is a proposed standard — currently being refined by the W3C — with the goal of providing a web-based set of tools that any device can use to share audio, video and data in real time. It’s still in the early stages, but WebRTC has the potential to supplant Skype, Flash and many device-native apps with web-based alternatives that work in your browser.

WebRTC support is already baked into Firefox for Android. Both the getUserMedia API and the PeerConnection API — key components of WebRTC and the cornerstones of web-based voice chat — are already supported though you’ll need to enable them in the preferences. See the Mozilla hacks blog for more details.

The same APIs are also now part of desktop Firefox in both the Nightly and Aurora channels. Expect both to make the transition from Nightly to final release as part of Firefox 22 (due some 10 weeks from now).

As Adam Roach, who works on Mozilla’s WebRTC team, writes, with these tools landing and some impressive demos from both the Firefox and Chrome WebRTC teams, “it’s tempting to view WebRTC as ‘almost done,’ and easy to imagine that we’re just sanding down the rough edges right now. As much as I’d love that to be the case, there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

That’s part of why Mozilla is asking developers to start experimenting with WebRTC — to help discover what works, what doesn’t and what needs to be better.

“As long as you’re in a position to deal with minor disruptions and changes; if you can handle things not quite working as described; if you are ready to roll up your sleeves and influence the direction WebRTC is going, then we’re ready for you,” writes Roach.

But it isn’t just experimenters that Mozilla is interested in, “for those of you looking to deploy paid services, reliable channels to manage your customer relationships, mission critical applications: we want your feedback too,” says Roach. He goes on to caution that developers should “temper your launch plans.”

Still, while it’s perhaps too early to launch a serious business built around WebRTC, you won’t have to wait long. According to Roach, WebRTC will be “a stable platform that’s well and truly open for business some time next year.”

Conversat.io, simple video chat in your browser.
Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

WebRTC is changing the web, making possible things which just a few short months ago would have been not just impossible, but nearly unthinkable. Whether it’s a web-based video chat that requires nothing more than visiting a URL, or sharing files with your social networks, WebRTC is quickly expanding the horizons of what web apps can do.

WebRTC is a proposed standard — currently being refined by the W3C — with the goal of providing a web-based set of tools that any device can use to share audio, video and data in real time. It’s still in the early stages, but WebRTC has the potential to supplant Skype, Flash and many device-native apps with web-based alternatives that work on any device.

Cool as WebRTC is, it isn’t always the easiest to work with, which is why the Mozilla Hacks blog has partnered with developers at &yet to create conversat.io, a demo that shows off a number of tools designed to simplify working with WebRTC.

Conversat.io is a working group voice chat app. All you need to do is point your WebRTC-enabled browser to the site, give your chat room a name and you can video chat with up to 6 people — no logins, no joining a new service, just video chat in your browser.

Currently only two web browsers support the WebRTC components necessary to run conversat.io, Chrome and Firefox’s Nightly Channel (and you’ll need to head to about:config in Firefox to enable the media.peerconnection.enabled preference). As such, while conversat.io is a very cool demo, WebRTC is in its infancy and working with it is sometimes frustrating — that’s where the libraries behind the demo come in.

As &yet’s Henrik Joreteg writes on the Hacks blog, “the purpose of conversat.io is two fold. First, it’s a useful communication tool…. Second, it’s a demo of the SimpleWebRTC.js library and the little signaling server that runs it, signalmaster.”

Both tools, which act as wrappers for parts of WebRTC, are designed to simplify the process of writing WebRTC apps — think jQuery for WebRTC. Both libraries are open source (MIT license) and available on GitHub for tinkering and improving.

If you’d like to learn more about SimpleWebRTC and signalmaster and see some example code, head on over to the Mozilla Hacks blog for the full details.

What if your web browser were also your phone? That’s a future being imagined by Mozilla, Ericsson and AT&T.

Mozilla has combined Firefox’s WebRTC support with Ericsson’s Web Communication Gateway and AT&T’s API Platform to put together a working demo of calls — both voice and video — and text messages all made from within Firefox.

Mozilla’s “WebPhone” is one part Skype, one part Apple’s Messages and all parts web.

The demo builds on previous Mozilla efforts like the recent WebRTC video calling demo with Google, as well as the Firefox Social API demo Mozilla showed off last year (the Social API provides the glue that brings your mobile contact info into Firefox in the video above).

Aside from the cool factor, web-based calling has a potentially huge benefit for users — no more need for your phone. Mozilla’s WebPhone concept would make it possible to call from any device and the person you’re calling would still see your info.

WebPhone also makes it easy to receive calls and messages anywhere. Anyone who’s ever used Apple’s Message app knows that it’s nice to get messages on the desktop, eliminating the need to track down your phone when you’re already in front of a screen. WebPhone would make it possible to not only get messages on whichever device you’re using, but take calls as well.

Indeed what’s most surprising about Mozilla’s WebPhone demo is that AT&T and Ericsson are involved since more than anything they’re participating in a vision of the future where they are little more than pipes for sending data.

If you happen to be in Barcelona Spain for the ongoing Mobile World Congress event you can check out a live demo of WebPhone at the Mozilla booth. For now the rest of us will have to settle for the demo video above.

Tracking Webmonkey. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

Developer Marko Dugonjić takes responsive design’s emphasis on you to new levels of interactivity with his experiment in typesetting by face detection.

Using a very cool JavaScript headtracking library — which taps WebRTC and getUserMedia to access your webcam — Dugonjić’s app calculates how close you are to the screen and adjusts the font size to make text more readable.

To see it in action, head on over to the demo page and grant it permission to use your webcam. For the most useful example, check out the onload-based implementation, but for a better sense of how it works be sure to try the “Realtime” version.

It may not be the most practical experiment and how well it works depends on plenty of factors well beyond the control of the site (how good your eyes are, whether or not you’re wearing your glasses and so on), but it’s not hard to imagine how this could be very useful in some situations — for example, bumping up font-size when your site is displayed on a television.

When you’re done playing with the resizing demo be sure to check out Dugonjić’s more practical and more immediately useful Typetester.

Modified WebRTC logo by Tsahi Levent-Levi/Flickr.

The demo bypasses a centralized server and instead makes a direct peer-to-peer connection between browsers. The key component of the demo is a set of work-in-progress standards known as WebRTC.

WebRTC is a proposed standard — currently being refined by the W3C — with the goal of providing a web-based set of tools that any device can use to share audio, video and data in real time. It’s still in the early stages, but WebRTC has the potential to supplant Skype, Flash and many device-native apps with web-based alternatives that work on any device.

The app that the Chrome and Firefox teams developed is available on Google Code and there’s a demo app available on Google app engine if you’d like to try it out for yourself. To make it work you’ll need to use either Firefox Nightly or Chrome 25 (currently in the beta channel). In Firefox, you’ll need to go to about:config and set media.peerconnection.enabled to “true.”

Mozilla has previously showed off a demo of WebRTC with it Social API and Chrome has previously used parts of WebRTC for an interactive sand sketching experiment. This latest demo relies on a new WebRTC trick known as RTCPeerConnection, which should arrive in final form in Chrome next month and Firefox around the end of May. The RTCPeerConnection support in both browsers means there’s no need for plugins and developers can rest assured their apps will “just work” across browsers. Together Chrome and Firefox account for just under 60 percent of browsers on the web.

There is of course one other major browser that’s not yet coming to the WebRTC party.

Indeed Microsoft has proposed a WebRTC competitor to the W3C, though thus far little has happened beyond the initial proposal. As it stands now neither WebRTC nor Microsoft’s competing CU-RTC-Web proposal are actual W3C standards, but work is progressing on WebRTC and, with browsers already implementing it in the wild, it stands a much better chance of becoming a standard one day.

It’s still a little early to throw out Skype. For now you’ll have to content yourself with a very cool demo and the tantalizing possibility to one day soon you might not need Skype, Facebook or any other third-party server to chat with friends around the web.

WT Monkey is in your photobooth.js, changin’ hues. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

The latest WebRTC hotness to catch our eye is developer Wolfram Hempel’s Photobooth.js, a JavaScript library for working with a device’s camera. Photobooth.js allows users to take pictures directly on your website, for example, to add an avatar. It also acts a bit like the OS X Photobooth app, offering real-time adjustments for hue, saturation and brightness (one word of warning, hue can really slow down Firefox).

Want to add a Photobooth-style camera app to your site? Just download Photobooth.js and add this code to your page:

myPhotobooth = new Photobooth( document.getElementById( "container" ) ); 

That’s it. Of course there’s a little more to do if you actually want to do something with your newly instantiated Photobooth — like capture images or resize and save them. But Photobooth.js makes the whole process pretty simple; see the documentation for more details.

Photobooth.js works in current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and any other browser that supports the WebRTC getUserMedia method. You can see a complete list of browsers that support getUserMedia over on caniuse.

Hempel’s code is available on GitHub (BSD license) and can be used as a standalone app or a JQuery plugin.

Mozilla is making good on its promise to take its fledgling Social API beyond the simple Facebook integration it showcased for the launch of Firefox 17. In fact, the company’s newest Social API demo removes the need for social websites entirely, tapping emerging web standards to create a real-time video calling, data sharing app — one part Skype, one part Facebook, all parts web-native.

The direct peer-to-peer video calls and file sharing features come from WebRTC, a proposed web standard that Mozilla and others are working on in conjunction with the W3C. The RTC in WebRTC stands for Real-Time Communications, and the core of WebRTC is the getUserMedia JavaScript API, which gives the browser access to hardware features like the camera and microphone.

Much of the enthusiasm around WebRTC comes from the fact that it enables web apps to do many of the same things that, without WebRTC support, require platform-native APIs. WebRTC will help developers build web apps that can compete with native apps, but it has other tricks up its sleeve — like a whole new way to connect with your friends on the web.

“While many of us are excited about WebRTC because it will enable several cool gaming applications and improve the performance and availability of video conferencing apps, WebRTC is proving to be a great tool for social apps,” writes Mozilla’s Maire Reavy on the Mozilla blog.

Reavy goes on to paint a picture of seamless social sharing through WebRTC and Mozilla’s Social API:

Sometimes when you’re chatting with a friend, you just want to click on their name and see and talk with them in real-time. Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos — or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in — simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.

Mozilla’s Social API-WebRTC mashup goes beyond previous demos, using a new WebRTC feature, one which Firefox is the first to support, DataChannels. DataChannels offer a way to send data from one WebRTC-enabled browser to another. DataChannels can send pretty much any data the browser can access, be it images, videos, webpages or local files.

For more details on how the DataChannel API works, check out this earlier post on the Mozilla Hacks blog. If you’d like to see exactly what’s happening behind the scenes of Mozilla’s Social API-WebRTC demo, the code is available on GitHub.

Chrome 22, which Google just dropped into the Chrome developer channel, marks the end of the line for Mac OS X 10.5 users. When Chrome 22 arrives in final form roughly three months from now it will require OS X 10.6 or newer.

Apple’s OS X 10.5 is looking a little long in the tooth these days, having been released some five years ago. Chrome isn’t the first to drop Leopard support, Mozilla’s recently released Firefox 13 does likewise and even Apple hasn’t updated Leopard since 2009.

If you aren’t using Leopard, you can grab the latest Chrome dev channel release from Google.

On the plus side for Leopard users (and everyone else), Chrome 21 — which has now been promoted to the beta channel — supports the getUserMedia API, which allows web developers to tap your device’s camera and microphone. That means web-based chat apps will work in Chrome. It also opens the door to other audio and video web apps that would once have required Flash or platform-native apps.

The getUserMedia support is also the first step in supporting the Web Real Time Communication (WebRTC) standard, which is also part of recent Firefox and Opera releases. Opera has some demos that show what WebRTC and getUserMedia can do. For another cool example of getUserMedia check out Magic Xylophone from developers Romuald Quantin and Magnus Dahlstrand of Stinkdigital.

Chrome 21′s getUserMedia isn’t the browser’s only new trick, this release also introduces support for the Gamepad Javascript API, which will allow developers to write web-based games that use videogame controllers.