Sure, two-way video chat on mobile devices is cool, but what if you could hold a video conference call with 4, 8, even 16 people in full 720p HD resolution? You’d probably want to give it a spin, right? Well, Ittiam is at Texas Instrument’s Mobile World Congress 2011 booth to demo their multi-party P2P video chat technology that can connect handfuls of people in 720p HD resolution. We’re not sure if we’ll ever see this tech going mainstream, but we’d definitely love to be able to one day chat with 16 of our closest friends in the kind of high-def video that makes even the slightest facial blemishes pop out.
The HD video conference demo used four TI OMAP 4 engineering devices, which accounts for the hideous form-factors you see in the photos and video, and were running on Android 2.2 Froyo. Ittiam used a wireline network to connect the devices to ensure smooth video streams (conferences are notorious for horrible WiFi and 3G service), but they assure us that they can reliably stream their video calls over 3G and 4G wireless networks.
The Ittiam demo reminds us of Oovoo’s multi-party mobile video chat service, which also runs on 3G and 4G networks, as well as WiFi. Oovoo uses a cloud-based approach, while Ittiam uses a peer-to-peer approach.
For the time being, the demo you see below will have to suffice. There’s a chance that we’ll see Ittiam’s technology integrated into future Android smartphones, but we’re not going to count our chickens before they hatch.