SemiSerious

Maybe I missed the point of Web 2.0, or maybe I just don’t have enough bandwidth available at my desktop to make it viable. Either way, it looks like videoconferencing is a technology worth watching.

Our friends at iSuppli recently announced that video conferencing was set to emerge as a major application. Their forecast suggests sales of over $500M and 113 million units this year growing to $664M and 236.7 million units in 2012.

But regular video conferencing is not going to give us any new technology. In fact, the iSuppli numbers point to a low cost imaging platform akin to cameraphones as they predict the per unit price to fall from $4.42 today down to $2.80 in 2012.

My own company, now TechInsights, experimented with Second Life as a platform for virtual events like presentations and meetings. Now the big boss at UBM which owns TechInsights, David Levin, has begun to use “telepresence” to describe how things will get done in the future. In other words, don’t confuse this with tele presents. It’s not the gifts your grandma orders by phone from the Home Shopping Network.

Now I’m sucking up to the big boss, but this is a technology that is bound to catch on – both in the boardroom and with anyone trying to go green. But the Cisco Telepresence idea offers more than saving on airfares and airplane exhaust. Although the video below does reflect today’s technology, it is an exciting view into what third or fourth generation technology might look like. It is quite exciting to think about.

Cisco’s present system uses either an IP phone or MS Outlook to schedule the video conference. It relies on various pieces of mature technology. If you watch some of the other YouTube videos or demos at Cisco’s website, the software and system integration of the audio and video systems actually enables the telepresence experience.

Image sensors are only a small piece of the puzzle for spreading videconferencing into the mainstream. Obviously Cisco’s interest is not in the imagers. They are looking at ways to increase internet bandwidth and packet handling demands. But there are some interesting drivers for imager technology nonetheless. This application will benefit from larger sensors. The users will be interested in high-def video on larger displays. (Cisco will be too with 720 or 1080 lines of video sucking up a lot more bandwidth than VGA.) Beyond display resolution, features like digital pan, tilt and zoom will enhance the telepresence experience. Although these features are not entirely new, it will require some engineering effort to integrate them with other improvements like face recognition and eye tracking to make telepresence more like being there.

When weighed against the costs in either dollars or travel delays associated with traditional face-to-face meetings, telepresence technology might be able to demand a price premium in order to provide users with the most seamless and natural experience possible. That might help some imaging chip makers to keep their heads above the commodity water line that iSuppli predicts just a little longer.

At the Intertech-Pira Image Sensor Conference a few weeks ago, I suggested that Google Street View might create a post-cameraphone demand boom for imagers. My reasoning (if it’s fair to call it that) was that the folks at Google have given us a useful virtual tourism concept simply by driving camera trucks around about 40 major US cities. But it struck me that Google’s approach is neither time nor location scalable. If you want fresh images, you need trucks rolling 24-7 just to achieve something like annual updating. Perhaps Google (who has the money for such an undertaking) will replace its current rolling camera approach with a vast array of permanent camera installations. Street View could then be “live.”

What about new locations? More trucks more time…I think you get the picture. With apologies to Little Rock and Milwaukee, I am interested in virtually touring around some places outside the good old USA. Well Google now has a competitor, and although you can only view three locations today, one is outside the US. MapJack offers Sausalito and San Francisco, California along with Chiang Mai, Thailand. Even with by giving us the first location beyond the borders of the US, it would hardly be fair to say that MapJack has leap-frogged Google Street View. However, MapJack does provide a better user experience and a convenient additional search window to browse for shopping or dining. I first heard of MapJack from Scott Bourne on This Week in Photography.

I don’t understand any of the nuts and bolts holding MapJack together, but it appears to depend on Google’s own Map grids and location-based information like dining and other entertainment options for anyone who intends to take a step beyond virtual touring. It will be interesting if MapJack gets large enough for Google to think about shutting down access to its map grid information.

Surely part of virtual tourism is a way to maintain your carbon-neutrality. But that won’t be the case if Google and MapJack are spewing truck exhaust to capture images. Vast networks of low-cost IP surveillance cameras are the only way to go.

On March 20, the famous Gibson Guitar Corporation sued Harmonix, MTV, and EA for infringement of US Patent 5,990,405 – System and Method for generating and controlling a Simulated Musical Concert Experience. The defendants named are meant to cover the entire Guitar Hero series as well as the newer Rock Band game. Gibson has since expanded its suit to cover various retailers who sell the games including Wal-Mart.

Gibson Guitar Corporation’s complaint, filed in the Nashville Division of Tennessee District Court (courtesy of Wired’s Game|Life) specifies the alleged infringement like this:

THE INFRINGING PRODUCTS AT ISSUE
16. Defendants have and continue to manufacture and/or sell products that infringe, contribute to the infringement of and/or induce the infringement of at least claims 1, 13-15, 25 and 28 of the ‘405 Patent and/or have no other substantial noninfringing uses.

Considering how the music industry works today, you have to assume that Harmonix spent a lot of time and legal fee dollars working out licensing deals with record labels for the songs that appear in Guitar Hero. After all that work, it’s no surprise that they may have overlooked the possibility of a company outside the gaming world developing the concept first.

But that’s not all. According to SI device sourcing guru, Allan Yogasingam, ActiVision has already paid a license fee to Gibson for use of the signature Les Paul style of guitar for its game controller. The Les Paul image and brand is a lot more valuable (and stronger) than the patent cited in this case.

Before reading the complaint above, I read through the claims of the ‘405 patent trying to determine what angle Gibson’s lawyers were taking. There are four independent claims and 26 supporting claims. At least one independent claim needs to be map to the game system for Gibson to have a case.

Claim 13 is the broadest, but will it hold up to prior art scrutiny? How do karaoke machines fit in? Wikipedia suggests that the first machine was invented in Japan in the 1970’s. The entry for Karaoke history points out that the original inventor did not patent the machine. The Philippines granted a Letters Patent (UM-5269) in 1983 to its most famous inventor, Roberto del Rosario, for a system originally prototyped in 1975.

But one key element of ‘405 in all the claims is the use of a video interface as well. Although the earliest karaoke machines relied on singers to know the words or read them from a paper song sheet, video teleprompting entered the fray some time in the eighties. I may not be young and hip and part of today’s crowd of gamers, but I wasn’t quite hitting the karaoke bars back then. Perhaps one of my blogging elders could help me sort out more accurate dates for the introduction of video into the karaoke system. The ‘405 patent was filed in 1998 years after video technology was readily available to the karaoke set.

Claim 21 maps most directly to the game. It specifies a guitar. That is the focal point. Gibson’s lawyers arguments against the prior art hinge on the definition of “musical instrument.” It won’t be the first time a huge bill gets rung up over semantics, but this case will come down to whether singing into a microphone constitutes a musical instrument or not. Your favorite singer won’t get a vote.