A couple of our dev teams are distributed, with remote members outside our Cambridge (MA) office. My team has one developer in San Francisco, and while we could do phone conferences easily, we want to make that developer feel more like part of the team, so we're trying video.
At the same time, we don't want to spend a lot of time or money on fancy videoconferencing equipment. Enter the "#GhettoFabulous" method of Google Hangout on a rotating office chair.
We take a standard chair, put it up on the desk in the middle of our standup conference room, put a laptop on it with a Google Hangout, and spin it around ;) Sometimes we maliciously spin it fast, making the people on the other end dizzy, but most of the time we just rotate it gently from person to person as they speak.
It's been working really well. We had a day earlier this week where half the team worked from home. During that standup, we had 5-6 live concurrent video streams in the Google Hangout, with no trouble at all. Good video and sound quality, and a great help overall.
Have you tried out something similar? What worked, what didn't?