Make video calls fun with your webcam

One of the reasons we love video chat is that it makes calls to relatives all over the world cheap and easy. I'm lucky in living close to my immediate family so it's not something I've felt the need to try. Last Saturday I was playing Club Penguin with the children and my parents appeared on Skype, so I thought why not give it a go? The result, a lot of fun, especially when we started playing with the various effects available on the computers.

I use a Microsoft Lifecam HD5000, and the memory of me in a massive electronic wig in the video review here still makes people in the office chuckle. Add a couple of children into the mix and everyone has a lot of fun.

The Lifecam software is quite easy to use in a conversation but you'll need to find its icon in the Notification Area. Left-click on this icon to show the Lifecam panel. The icon with the gear on it is used to set up the brightness and colour options, but that's not why we're here.

Instead, click on the stars on the left of the toolbar to see the different effects that can be applied to the video.

Some of the swirly effects are a little pointless unless you have some vested interest in obscuring your face, which ruins the point of having a webcam in the first place.

The overlays are much more fun, from the now famous wig to the rabbit ears or dark glasses. The face detection is pretty good and it became a fun game trying to get the webcam to move the decoration between the children.

My parents' laptop has a webcam built in, so they didn't have these effects to call on, but they managed to find some animated pictures to send, which had the children in gales of laughter.

So while we still recommend Skype and other video calling services for the important business of staying in touch with absent friends and relatives, don't forget that you can have fun as well. Or even see if you can fool the face detection with made up objects, as we did during the 'research' for this blog post.