Week of May 21, 2001 Editor's Choice Web Pick |
![]() Project Monitoring via Digital Images over the Web By JACK LYNE Site Selection Executive Editor of Interactive Publishing
'Examples' Are Site's Money Shots ![]() As the site explains, Inet OnSite provides the whole shooting match - cameras, PCs and support - for its system. There's no need for you to be (or vainly pretend to be) a Web tech geek. (If you have your own JPEG-format digital camera, however, it can be included in the OnSite system as what the site calls "your portable foreman camera.") Users also get sharp images, as the site's examples demonstrate. Image resolution is 640 x 48 pixels; or users can jack the quality up to 1152 x 864. Users can set their cameras to shoot one shot per second; most users opt to shoot one picture per hour, according to the site. In addition, customers can remotely zoom in their cameras. (The technology, however, hasn't yet been developed to provide pans that don't suffer frequent failures). There's no need for users to have phat-boy pipes, the site explains. The images move from the project site via customer-provided standard analog phone line. From OnSite's servier, though, pictures travel to viewers via multiple high-speed Internet connections. An Online Documentation Repository Once the images hit OnSite's server, users have a project-documentation repository. All ongoing project images reside on OnSite's servers and can be accessed on demand, delivered via high-speed-connection data streaming. Users can also incorporate OnSite's images of their projects as part of their own Web pages.At the end of a project, customers can opt to secure time-lapse project documentation, either on CD-ROM or videotape. Is this a system you need? Or do you need any Web-based project monitoring system? "The Online Insider," we reiterate, isn't in the business of recommending products, a task best left to Consumer Reports. For the record, though, here are OnSite's damages. Installing a single-camera system runs about US$2,400; each additional camera costs $822.75. Charges for storing data are $400 a month. Lawyers on Fish Cam? Created by Arlington, Mass.-based Inet Architects, Inet OnSite is part of a Web wave that's almost certainly evolutionary. Streaming video over the Web has severe limits at this point: fuzzy images that jerkily unfold in a tiny box, virtually defying meticulous scrutiny.But high-quality Web video will come - and perhaps sooner than any of us imagine. In the meantime, services like Inet OnSite's certainly have their allure: For example, would you rather listen to a lawyer's prattling, or instead slap down conclusive visual proof on the table. Just to dream, such a feat might even transform the lawyer into an on-camera subject on The Amazing Netscape Fish Cam. Probably not. But it's a not-unattractive notion, don't you think? |
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