In Star Trek and movies like and Blade Runner , they actually got video calling and telepresence right. For starters, in these movies and shows, you frequently see these video calls as being screened before a picture shows up. Secondly, you only tend to see a person's face, because people don't want to get caught off-guard in their living room or their bedroom with half or less than half of their clothes on or appearing in a casual, unkempt way.
For what it's worth, I'm leaving out the adult applications of telepresence for those who WANT to be naked on video.
That's an entirely different conversation and outside the scope of this article. In an age where we can now easily move from point-to-point transmitting VGA or 1 or 2 Megapixels to full p full-motion HD video representations of bodies and faces in sharp detail, along with every pore and imperfection using relatively inexpensive hardware, people will become very self-conscious of making ad-hoc video calls especially if their bodies and wider fields of view of their homes and personal spaces are exposed.
So what about technologies like Apple's FaceTime? I'm not going to argue that this isn't a killer feature for the device, and certainly the commercials portray a more human and emotional aspect to linking people together using the technology.
But as in Sci-Fi, FaceTime is a good application of telepresence because it allows the users at each end to be selective, and because the field of view is limited to the face and not in super-sharp, p or p detail yet it allows for some privacy if needed.
Still, I think technologies such as FaceTime will be the exception rather than the rule, and price, while not the primary factor, is definitely going to have some influence as to how quickly the technology is used. And I don't even want to get into the issue of competing protocol standards for video calling.
That needs to get sorted out way before we get into a "You can't call my Revue or my Droid from your iPhone or vice versa because you use FaceTime or Umi instead" situation.
And I've said in regards to streaming video in hotels and use of other public Wi-Fi hotspots , the accompanying backbone public infrastructure to make these calls more commonplace than for just arranged corporate video meetings via WAN or point-to-point tunneling is going to have to be beefed up considerably.
You think the download speeds at a hotel are bad from congestion and shared segmentation? Even if the 4G and public Wi-Fi bandwidth and Internet backbone is beefed up, however, there's one other thing that's nagging me about video calling, and that has to do with the generation of customer that companies like Apple, Logitech and Cisco think they are marketing to. As far as I can tell, the only people who might even be remotely interested in this sort of thing are Gen-X and Boomers, who want to see their children and grandchildren over long distances.
It's no secret that Apple's FaceTime commercials strongly feature children talking to parents and grandparents. But Generation Y? Give me a break.
We're talking about an entire demographic that prefers to communicate over texting and FaceBook rather than make voice calls, so that they can shield themselves from regular human contact as necessary. We picked her image from the list of contacts, and after a brief ring or two, the television show we were watching quickly snapped over to the video call. Video quality was clear, though colors—particularly my dark red shirt—appeared a bit oversaturated. But good luck blaming the camera when your mother complains about your washed out clothing.
The auto focus functionality was a bit slow, but it worked well enough. Audio quality was adequate, but not quite stellar. An array of five microphones is built into the face of the camera. In addition, Cisco will likely air commercials featuring Canadian actress Ellen Page, in a reprisal of her role in a series of ads to promote Cisco's telepresence for business. In reaction to Cisco's Umi, Skype invoked Moore's Law, the essence of which is that technology gets faster, smaller, and cheaper over time.
And, when unbeatable lower cost, high performance options are readily available, spending at the top-end can be like throwing money away, especially if you are buying a video calling system and there is no one else to call," Skype's Jonathan Christensen said in a blog post.
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Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion. Cisco Umi brings HD telepresence to the living room The Umi service includes a Cisco high-definition camera with an embedded microphone, a set-top box, and a remote, but you'll need your own HDTV and Internet connection.
Jessica Dolcourt. The Umi service requires that you supply your own high-definition TV.
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