Google's advance into the space traditionally held by IM and VoIP providers continues this week, as the company has announced enhancements to video calling in Gmail Chat.
While it hasn't been rolled out to all users by default, the new features can be activated through the ‘Labs' options. According to the service's official blog, numerous tweaks have been made that should significantly improve the quality of video calls within the client. Enabling the changes will result in higher quality video using an all new playback mechanism which allows for widescreen VGA (800x480px) resolutions.
Apparently the changes are also more efficient, using fewer system resources despite the improvements.
To enable the new settings, simply turn on ‘Video chat enhancements' under the Labs tab within Gmail. As with any of the Google Labs projects, the developers are constantly working on further updates, which will be automatically rolled out as they're finished.
Whlie it isn't quite up to the level of HD video-calling offered by some of the competition, Google is clearly continuing to push its chat services as a serious alternative. Especially now that the company offers the ability to call phones from within a browser, Gmail Chat is getting close to feature parity with the incumbent services.
Even though it's currently in the development stage, the continued improvements to the IM client should be deployed to all users in the near future.
