Telepresence
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.
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