SAN FRANCISCO — They probably won't be eating rats, but you never know with dorm food.
Coming this fall, 361 high school graduates will let the world eavesdrop on their daily dramas as they fan out from their Silicon Valley homes to colleges and jobs all over the country.
This isn't another network's response to CBS's reality show "Survivor," and no one's getting voted out of the dorm. It's just the class of 2000 at Santa Clara, Calif.'s Wilcox High School, who picked up free Web cameras as they exited the commencement ceremony held Friday night on the school's football field.
The cameras, which attach to a computer to record images and sell for $50 each, were donated by Logitech, a Swiss Web cam firm, and its San Mateo partner SpotLife, a Web site that hosts home movies made with the cameras.
SpotLife is hoping that the graduates will post their adventures to its Web site, which currently hosts such riveting material as a 24-hour view of the aquarium of a turtle named Pixel and countless office workers sitting at their desks.
To encourage the graduates to use the equipment, SpotLife and Logitech are giving out two $10,000 scholarships, two personal computers and 20 more Web cams to the students who do the best job depicting their new lives online.
Although the scholarships have created some buzz at Wilcox High, most students say they want to use the Web cams to keep in touch with friends and family back home and at other schools.
"All my closest friends are going to (the University of California at) Davis or Berkeley, so I thought I'm hardly going to see them anymore," said Chelsea Nelson, who's heading off to Brigham Young University in the fall. "But with the Web cam I can send them pictures of me and they can send me pictures of themselves. Or for their birthdays, I could sing happy birthday on the camera."
Even with the broadband connections now ubiquitous in college dorms, Web cam movies are still somewhat swimmy and disjointed. But valedictorian Christopher Hussey pointed out that a visual "Hi, Mom" is a lot more personal than e-mail. Although he's enthusiastic about trying out his new camera, Hussey's not sure if he'll be using it in college.
"I'm going to the Naval Academy. I wouldn't be surprised if they take it away," Hussey said.
Wilcox principal Cliff Harris said that although the school, nestled between the campuses of Intel, Cisco and Sony, has received plenty of bounty from high tech companies in the form of donated computers and training, this is the first time anyone's ever offered free gifts for graduates.
"I was somewhat hesitant at first because of the commercialism involved," Harris said. "But we looked at the total gift that was going to be given to the senior class and decided it was worth it."
Originally, SpotLife wanted to hand out the colorful Web cam boxes on stage right with the diplomas, but the school moved the giveaway to the end of the ceremony, as the students left the field.
Harris said he'd received nothing but positive feedback from parents, many of whom were looking forward to checking in with their kids on-screen.
But Andrew Hagelshaw of Oakland, Calif.'s Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, complained that the giveaway was basically a school-sponsored product promotion, and worried that it might spark a trend.
"If this graduation giveaway deal becomes more common, you will see people upset about it," Hagelshaw said.
SpotLife's participation in the ceremony was planned to be unobtrusive, SpotLife spokeswoman Amy Bohutinsky said, and because uploading video to the site is free, the gifts come with no strings attached. But she acknowledged that the event was an marketing tactic to get ordinary people excited about using Web cams.
"There are a lot of possibilities for personal broadcast, but people haven't explored it yet," Bohutinsky said. "This is the class of 2000, they're the ones who can think of the new uses for this."
Although SpotLife has had the ability to broadcast real-time video with sound since the beginning of May, most of its users are still uploading traditional mute Web cam images, updated every few seconds or minutes.