WebRTC allows developers to add real-time voice calls, video chats and file sharing to their web apps without the need for plug-ins. Chrome and Firefox now support this proposed standard, and there is a good chance others will follow suit at some point. Given the experimental nature of WebRTC and some of its implementations, though, most Internet users haven’t actually seen it in action, and getting it to run on your own site still takes quite a bit of work despite projects like Conversat.io and others.
If you would like to give WebRTC a try and embed a WebRTC-based video chat widget on your own site, the developers over at the Boston-based UI and UX design firm Fresh Tilled Soil just launched an embeddable WebRTC-based video chat widget that you can use.
Our WordPress setup sadly doesn’t want to embed the widget correctly, but head over here and give it a try.
Just like most similar projects, all you have to do is decide on a channel name, share it with a friend and you should be up and running a few seconds later.
That is, of course, if you are using a compatible browser. For now, you need to use the latest stable version of Chrome on the desktop or Chrome Beta on Android – support for Firefox is coming very soon. Because WebRTC sets up a peer-to-peer connection, the host only handles the initial handshake, so the server load is very low.
This WebRTC experiment is the latest in a series of tests Fresh Tilled Soil has recently launched, by the way, including some that make use of the new WebAudioAPI for audio processing and Media Capture and Streams for audio input. Fresh Tilled Soil also produces this cool little experiment that uses your webcam to adjust the font size based on your distance to your screen.