Over the weekend the hackers, tweakers and general-fiddlers gathered together at the C-4 developer conference and voted for the most creative iPhone hack as part of the “Iron Coder Live” contest.  The rules demand that the hack be a short-term project, but that didn’t stop this year’s winners – Glen and Ken Aspeslagh – from setting their sights high.  They came up with a two-way videoconferencing app for the iPhone, tackling issues such as getting video from the usually-image-only camera, compressing it to fit nicely over an EDGE connection, and even matters of placement (Apple thoughtlessly neglected to put a camera on the front of the iPhone).

Okay, so the mirror arrangement possibly isn’t the most pocket-friendly contraption (it’s actually a hacked-up Huckleberry periscope the twins make for the MacBook webcam) but given the tight timescale it’ll do.  The software, which relied on jailbreak and then having the iPhone toolchain installed, is yet to be released either as a finished package or as source code, but it’s already clever enough to recognise orientation and switch between picture-in-picture (landscape mode) or split-screen (portrait mode).

“Our contest entry captures video from the iPhone’s camera, compresses it, and sends it to a web server, where it’s relayed to another iPhone, and vice-versa, resulting in a nice two-way video conference. Need audio too? That’s not our department but simply make a phone call to the other person’s iPhone and put them on speaker phone. Then fire up our program and you’re in business”

Well done, guys!  I’d be really interested in seeing how this might be developed assuming they release the code for more audio-friendly developers to play with.