Google software engineer Justin Uberti shared the news on the company’s Chromium blog:

“Chrome now includes the PeerConnection API, which allows developers to create web apps with real-time audio and video calling without the need for a plug-in. Together, PeerConnection and thegetUserMedia API represent the next steps in WebRTC, a new standard which aims to allow high quality video, audio, and data communications on the web.”

Uberti illustrated the capabilities of the new API with a demo video chat application, which can be accessed after installing the latest Chrome beta release.

WebRTC is a big deal for Google: The company aims to replace the proprietary plugin it has been using to facilitate Google+ Hangout video chats with a standards-based solution that would work in a variety of browsers without the download of any additional plugins. WebRTC could also eventually lead to more interoperability across a number of video chat and messaging services, and it could be an even bigger disruption to mobile video communication.

However, it is likely going to take some time before WebRTC becomes a widely adopted standard. Microsoft publicly joined the WebRTC camp in August – but also slowed things down a bit by proposing a different approach than then one now implemented by Google.

Image courtesy of Flickr user  Tsahi Levent-Levi.

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According to Maker-in-Chief Sherry Huss via phone, Google approached Make last May with the idea of setting up a day camp for those interested in Make’s unique approach to do-it-yourself. “Google was looking at growing their Google+ audience,” she said, adding that once they agreed to the project, people from Google came to the Make offices to help plan 30 days of content, featuring 30 unique makers.

Each day of the week was based on a theme:

• Maker Monday
• Tinkering Tuesday
• Weird Science Wednesday
• Theoretical Thursday
• Field Trip Friday

And projects ranged from building a potato cannon to creating animated GIFs to book-binding. Field Trip Fridays included video trips to CERN, NASA and Disney’s Imagineering headquarters.

The structure of each day devoted mornings to individual work on various projects, followed by a Google+ hangout at noon (also live-streamed on YouTube) for the day’s “guest counselor” to discuss the project and answer any questions.

Maker Camp was officially targeted at those over the age of 13 due to Google+ age restrictions, though younger kids were allowed to participate via their parents’ accounts. According to Make senior director of marketing Vickie Welch, feedback received from library programs indicates that the Maker Camp audience leaned towards the 18-year-old age bracket, with adults also enjoying the content.

This week, Make announced via email that Maker Camp will return in the summer of 2013, and looking forward, Huss said that they look to experiment with integrating more with schools and libraries to build audience, as well as continue the Field Trip Fridays hangouts on perhaps a biweekly basis through the school year.

In addition, the possibility of monetizing the program with sponsorship is an option, as Huss cited the Field Trip Friday at Ford Motors as a particularly good example of brand outreach. “Kids were saying, I had no idea Ford was green. I want my first car to be a Ford,” she said.

In the meantime, all of the Maker Camp content remains archived on YouTube and makezine.com. Because learning to make something is always evergreen.

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“Unlike the old video chat, which was based on peer-to-peer technology, Hangouts utilize the power of Google’s network to deliver higher reliability and enhanced quality. While all Gmail users will experience these benefits, if you’ve created a Google+ profile you can invite up to nine other participants to your video meetings and take advantage of advanced features like screen sharing and integrated Google Docs collaboration.”

That being said, people will still be able to make video calls with Hangouts if they haven’t signed up for Google+ yet, but they’re going to be presented with a light version of the Hangouts client that only allows 1:1 video calling. The new feature will be rolled out to personal GMail accounts first, and then come to Google apps accounts in the coming weeks.

Google representatives first mentioned at last month’s Google I/O conference that the company was working on merging its various messaging, voice and video products. Making these products more appealing and less confusing to consumers is an obvious reason for this step, but Google is also working on advancing the core technology of its voice and video messaging clients. The next generation of Hangouts will be powered by WebRTC, which will make it possible to use video chat directly in the browser without the need for any plug-in.

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Hangout Captions were announced by Google’s Technical Program Manager for Accessibility Engineering Naomi Black, who wrote on Google+ that users can either use in live captions from a professional transcription service, or simply do it themselves and type the spoken word into a text box within the Hangout app. “This is an early look at the app so you can tell us what you think,” she added. Black illustrated the functionality with the following video:

This isn’t the first time Google has addressed issues of accessibility for Google+. The Google+ team did some tests to better support sign language for the video chat service a year ago, and the company added captions for Google+ videos last month.

Google has also been adding a number of captioning features to YouTube. The site is now supporting machine captioning in multiple languages, and added captioning for live events a year ago.

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Asked about why Google has multiple different services for video chat and messaging, including Google Talk, Google+ Messenger and Google+ Hangouts, Google Product Manager Nikhyl Singhal admitted: “We have done an incredibly poor job servicing our users here.” Singhal said that Google doesn’t have anything to announce at this point, but that the company is definitely working on unifying all of these experiences.

Singhal and his colleague Chee Chew, who has been credited with inventing Google+ Hangouts, also shared a few more details about how Google uses Hangouts internally. The company uses video conferencing for virtually all of its meetings, and Singhal said that this has been completely switched to Hangouts as a video conferencing solution. “We do over 10,000 hangouts every day at Google,” he said.

So which other features are coming to Hangouts? Chew and Singhal didn’t share too many specifics, but said that they’re striving to make any Hangouts feature available on every supported device. This includes allowing mobile phone users to start a Hangout on Air, which will essentially bring mobile social live streaming to Google+ and YouTube.

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Chew told me that this type of interactive live streaming could be used by Occupy Wall Street protesters, couples who want to live stream their wedding to remote friends and college professors conducting public office hours. Check out my entire interview with Chew below:

Hangouts was launched as part of Google+ last year and has since become a bit of a surprise hit. Chew’s comments seem to suggest that the platform could become key in Google’s and YouTube’s bigger plans to compete with live streaming platforms like Ustream and Livestream.

Google recently launched apps for Hangouts, allowing third-party developers to extend video chats with games, slideshows and flowcharts. Chew said that developers have been implementing things the Google team would have never thought of.

The same thing is true for Hangouts users and the way they have been adopting the platform: “We tuned the codec for voice,” Chew told me. “And then people started doing music over it, and playing concerts… people are really pushing the envelope.”

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The extension, which is aptly called Accessible Hangouts, uses text-to-speech to tell blind people when they are entering and exiting their Hangouts, and even reads all the text chat messages of a Hangout out loud. Take a peek at Mansour’s demo below:

Mansuour wrote in a Google+ post Wednesday night that he hacked the extension together in a few hours after meeting a blind war veteran in a Google+ Hangout:

I was writing on the chat on the left, and it was really difficult for him to read the text. I am really into accessibility, and I worked on it a lot in Chromium in the past, and I really wanted to help him. So I told Tim, ‘what if the chat spoke to you?’ Tim said, ‘that would be awesome’. When I saw the big smile on his face, I had to do it!

The Accessible Hangouts extension is an open source project, and Mansour’s hope is that Google will eventually integrate it natively into Hangouts. The chances for such a step are actually pretty good: Google has spent a lot of time making Hangouts more accessible and has in the past worked on ways to optimize the group video chat for mute and deaf people.

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Chill’s take on Hulu’s content comes with an interesting twist: Chill uses a so-called social appointment TV schedule to encourage as many people as possible to tune in at the same time. Episodes of individual shows are scheduled to repeat every three hours and can’t be viewed on Chill.com outside of that schedule. Shows are scheduled to be featured on Chill the day they debut on Hulu.

During a phone conversation Tuesday, Chill founder Brian Norgard told me the site will eventually add more ways to access archived content from Hulu as well, with the end goal being to have all of Hulu.com on the site — but for now, the focus is squarely on shows that are current and in season. “This is the true water cooler effect,” said Norgard.

The site also wants to make it easier for viewers to find new TV show episodes. Fans can subscribe to a particular show to get an email whenever a new episode pops up on Chill.

Chill has long been described as a sort of turntable.fm for video, and the site has certainly taken a few cues from Turntable’s crowdsourced real-time media curation approach. Chill users can still start their own rooms and watch YouTube clips and music videos together, and the site recently announced a partnership with Vevo. “We have had tremendous success with this product, but we didn’t want to be limited by it,” said Norgard.

A number of companies have experimented with real-time social interaction around video content before, including the kind of virtual viewing parties networks like Bravo have been doing as well as Google’s recent integration of YouTube into its Hangouts video chat. Norgard said Chill’s approach is a little different: It doesn’t just try to connect you with your social graph, but instead create social bonds with like-minded strangers.

He went on to say that Chill’s big bet was about a more interactive TV future, as opposed to one that brings online content to leanback platforms. “We are really building Chill for the lean-forward customer,” he told me.

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This change also means Hangouts and Google Talk will be replacing the H.264 video codec with Google’s open-source WebM video format.

Google has been using proprietary technology licensed from Vidyo to facilitate voice and video chat within Google Talk as well as Google+ Hangouts until now. However, work has been underway for a while to replace the plugin with an open-source implementation based on WebRTC, a framework for real-time voice and video communications that Google open-sourced in May.

Now it looks like this work will soon pay off: WebRTC Group Product Manager Serge Lachapelle wrote Tuesday morning that his team is “heads down” working on Webkit patches to bring a WebRTC enabled version of Chrome to the public. He added: “You’ll notice the brilliant work by Ericsson, whom have [sic] been helping out a ton in driving this.”

The WebRTC group also recently announced its work to the wider Webkit developer community. The exact timing of the Chrome release with WebRTC is unclear, but Lachapelle hinted at more upcoming news in his post:

“Hopefully our next post will be soon, and will include a more useful URL :)”

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Vevo called this first effort to bring the alive web to Vevo a “test run,” and said that the artists chosen will be actively involved. From the announcement blog post:

The best part? There’s a good chance that the artists themselves will drop in from time to time. Maybe announced, maybe not. It would be pretty cool to check a Snoop video and chat with the big Dogg himself at the same time. The more you hang out, the better your chances are.

Chill launched in August as a an offshoot of social conversation site Namesake, and it has clearly taken a few hints from the real-time collaborative music platform Turntable.fm. Users get cute comic avatars and can collectively program video playlists together.

The site isn’t exclusively focused on music videos, and in the past it has been used to stream live videos from events like TechCrunch Disrupt. However, hanging out together and watching music videos seems like a natural fit, and Snoop Dogg has actually been active on the site even before the partnership with Vevo was announced.

Learn more about the future of the alive web at the GigaOM RoadMap conference this week in San Francisco.

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