Face-to-face videoconferencing is the latest application to be developed for the Apple iPhone .

Despite the iPhone not being designed for video calling, and the significant drawback of the iPhone's camera being on the back, two ingenious developers claim to have rigged up a mirror arrangement and used some clever coding to bring face-to-face video calling to the iPhone. The iPhone videoconferencing application, developed by Ken and Greg Aspeslagh of Ecamm Network, uses Wi-Fi for the data connection, rather than the mobile network.

The developers first had to jailbreak their iPhones (to get into the OS), and then used the toolchain developed by the iPhone Dev Team to help create the application. The app uses the iPhone's camera to shoot video (although video isn't enabled regularly on the iPhone), and this is compressed and sent to a server to be relayed back to another iPhone. The mirror arrangement is an adaptation of an existing periscope-style "Huckleberry mirror" sold for use with MacBooks.

The process for developing the iPhone videoconferencing app is described by the developers at MacDaddyWorld.com.

Phil Lattimore, Tech.co.uk