So what kind of innovations can come out of telepresence in the future? 3D presence, for instance.

Now 3D video conferencing is cool, but not futuristic enough for me. As with any other technological question, my old faithful place to look for a solution is science fiction. Here are a few books I’ve read in the past few years that had some interesting suggestions on what telepresence will look like in the future.

Rainbows End / Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge is one hell of a science fiction writer. I love his books and his ideas. The one that strikes me the most plausible is Rainbows Ends, where he takes our current state of digital communications to an extreme that makes too much sense.

Here’s a piece of a first 3D call of an old person using this “every-day” technology:

“When the phone call came, he thought he was having a stroke. There were bright flashes before his eyes, and a faraway buzzing sound [...]

Robert squinted and shrugged, squinted again. And then suddenly he got it right: his visitor was standing in the middle of the bedroom [...]

Robert stood and stepped to the side, looking behind the visitor. The image was so sold, so complete. [...]

Robert walked back and forth in front of the visitor. He was still boggled by the medium of the message.”

So what do we have here?

• Teleconferencing, as it is termed in the book.
• Based on augmented reality.
• Has some privacy features built into it, but it requires opt-outs and configurations.
• The better CPUs you have, the better effects you can provide (shading, lighting, impressing with your surroundings, etc).

This teleconferencing/augmented reality thing is used through the book in the everyday life of the people; without a need to think about it or prepare for it. This is quite the opposite of today’s telepresence solutions.

Dauntless / Jack Campbell

I started reading Jack Campbell from Amazon’s recommendations, and liked it immediately. It’s a great book about a hero who wishes to be left alone.

While the settings of the books (it’s a series) are in space, as part of a full star fleet, the actual technology being used is a bit of a downer. It doesn’t seem plausible that in so much time from now all that we will be capable of doing is staying in those darn conference rooms with equipment that is too familiar:

“Geary went inside. Desjani followed him into the room, then when he paused, she indicated one seat not far from the door. The conference room wasn’t all that large in reality. Geary had seen it with the conferencing system off, just a moderately sized room with a moderately sized table to accommodate those who might actually sit in here. But with the systems on, as Geary came to his designated seat at the table, he saw it stretching out with scores of seats, each seat occupied by the commanding officer of a fleet ship. Geary couldn’t help staring a little at them, amazed at how each officer looked exactly like he or she was sitting here instead of on their own ships. As his eyes focused on each, their image came close, as if they were now sitting nearby, and a small tag popped up with their name and ship clearly identified. In the center of the table, easy to see from every seat, a large projection showed the disposition of the Alliance Fleet and the Syndics. Virtual image technology had clearly improved during his long sleep.

I guess it’s a lot easier to hold meetings now. [...]“

So what’s the difference here from today’s systems?

• It’s telepresence at its best – including the fancy room and expensive furniture.
• It has a solution for very large meetings (over 100 commanders) – the room expands or shrinks as required.
• It has a presentation control with chair management (same as in today’s systems).
• There’s the added meta-data showing the participants.

I’d say Jack Cambell read the H.323 standards before he wrote this book. I expected more out of a space opera written only 4 years ago.

Star Strike / Ian Douglas

Start Strike is another space opera, but where Jack Cambell decided to stay with today’s technologies, Ian Douglas took it a step further:

“He grimaced. Personal filters were an important part of modern electronic communications. Within a noumenal setting – literally inside the participants’ heads – your personal icon could take on any appearance desired, anything within the programming range of the AIs giving the encounter substance. Filters allowed the image projected into the group mind’s virtual space to be of your own choosing, with apparent dress, body language, even inflection of voice under your control.

[...]

Mentally, he looked down at himself. As usual, he was projecting his real-world appearance into the galactic imagery… which, at the moment, was of a lean middle-aged man with graying hair and a dour expression. He was also naked.

[...]

It was, Alexander decided, a bit like being in an enormous fish tank. The delegates of the Defense Advisory Council appeared in the simulation as small and relatively unobtrusive icons, until one or another spoke. At that point, the icon unfolded into what appeared to be a life-sized image, standing on emptiness and aglow with its own corona. With a swarm of golden icons surrounding him, together with a larger swarm of smaller, dimmer icons representing the group’s cloud of digital secretaries and personal electronic assistants, he felt as though he were a large and somewhat clumsy whale immersed within a school of fish.”

So what’s here?

• “Electronic communications” done within the mind – no external equipment needed, so no peripherals.
• Filters, icons, chair control.

The book doesn’t focus on the technology or the communications, but rather on the actual storyline, so there aren’t a lot of paragraphs like the one I just quoted in the book.

I have added the rest of the series into my wish list though.

Counting Heads / David Marusek

With all the debates going on today over Google Buzz and our loss of privacy, Counting Heads can serve as a reminder of a bleak future. While it holds ideas about the future of security, privacy, user generated content and personal cloud computing, it also has an important component of telepresence and communications:

“On my way to the kitchen I passed the living room and saw that Eleanor was having difficulties of her own. Even with souped-up holoservers, the living room was a mess. There were dozens of people in there and, as best as I could tell, just as many rooms superimposed over each other. People, especially self-important people, liked to bring their offices with them when they went to meetings. The result was a jumble of merging desks, lamps and chairs. Walls sliced through each other at drunken angles. Windows issued cityscape views of New York, London, Washington and Moscow (and others I didn’t recognize) in various shades of day and weather. People, some of whom I recognized from the newsnets, either sat at their desks in a rough, overlapping circle or wandered through walls and furniture to kibitz with each other and with Eleanor’s Cabinet.

At least this was how it all appeared to me standing in the hallway, outside the room’s emitters. To those inside, it might look like the Senate chambers.”

So what do we have here?

• Telepresence will be done by holograms – it’s even called holopresence.
• Point of view will screw up the whole experience.
• People will not share only themselves but also their surroundings.
• The conference size is practically unlimited.

This book holds a “holopresence” call on every other page, with a lot more concepts being outlined. All in all, it’s a great read and an interesting take on the future of videoconferencing.

-

If you’re in to science fiction, then Ran wrote a list of such books that you might also want to read.

Download your free eBook guide on Video Conferencing, the Enterprise and You. Post from: Video over Enterprise

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There are numerous rumors regarding Apple’s plans in this area – some surfaced before the iPad was even introduced to the world and some state that the camera is there but hidden for the time being. Similar rumors have surfaced about the iPhone as well.

My own feeling? This won’t happen any time soon. Especially not for the iPad.

The iPad is a tablet PC. It is something you place on your lap and browse. And if you are engaged in a video call, there is no way you are going to leave it on your lap. Need convincing? Here’s a picture I took with my phone from a “”lap holding position”. Ignoring the fact that I do need a haircut and a shave (done both since the picture was taken), do you notice my enlarged nostrils? Or the ceiling? Or the lighting on my wall calendar? Or the angry angles of that calendar, wall and picture?

It just won’t work for video conferencing. Too much hair in the nose just won’t look good at high definition.

So what a man to do in such a case? Do you say hold that iPad straight instead? Here’s the result of that one:

Well, now it does look better and that nose is still mine. Big, but no nostrils. A bit too serious I must confess, but the real problem is something that my wife would notice immediately. She’s a Pilates teacher, and she’ll simply say that I need to take that stress off of my shoulders and put them back in place. I am holding that phone (or iPad which weighs a bit more) in front of my face to take this image. Will I be able to do it for a full video call session? With the need to concentrate on what’s being said at the same time? No.

You see – an iPad is a great device with lots of uses. Especially when it comes to reading and browsing. But it’s not a visual communications device. The camera isn’t positioned in the right place. A front facing camera just doesn’t make any sense here. Visual communications is happening – there’s no doubt about it. Some of the use cases need to be figured out and the one for the iPad isn’t an easy one.

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[Fabrizio Ghetti, who wrote a very useful post on camera shopping tips had more tips for you about cameras, so here's another post - this time, camera positioning. As you'll be able to see, I assisted with the images.]

So you’ve selected a camera. Great!  Now it’s time to decide where to position it.

This decision should not be taken lightly – you should keep in mind that the image will change if the camera is put over, under or to the side of the monitor. This can be seen in the images below (The camera is at a 2-3 meter distance):

There are two main options here:

1. Have it fixed in a specific position
2. Have it separated from the system and connected with a wire – let the customer decide…

In the fixed scenario, the video camera will usually be positioned above the display itself. Here are a few examples where that is the case:

• Our VC240 monitor, a personal video communication device
• Laptops with built-in cameras
• Videophones such as the GXV3140

Fixed camera position determined by the form factor of the product

The best possible place, in terms of eye contact, is the middle of your monitor. While that might be possible if you are designing the high end of a high-end system (for people with $750K to spare on a telepresence system), this probably won’t be the case.

This means ending up with positioning the camera somewhere around the monitor. The usual suspects are on top of the display or below it, and there’s no clear answer which one is better. It depends on the size of the monitor and its distance from the participants. For example, if you use a 50″ monitor with participants located at around 3-4 meters from it, then placing the camera on top of the monitor will give the best results; but – with the 50″ monitor, if the camera is only 2 meters from the participants, then you better place it below the monitor – otherwise, you’ll be seeing too much forehead.

Room system in one of our meeting rooms: HD video conferencing camera at the bottom and an additional webcam at the top, for use with SCOPIA Desktop.

Of course, if you decide on placing the camera on top of the monitor, you need to check its weight, dimensions, and ease of ability to be mounted on top of the monitor.

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My friend, who is aware of our own SCOPIA VC240 product – a 24″ PC monitor with built-in HD video conferencing capabilities, told me that Apple’s 27″ all-in-one Mac monitor should probably add such a capability as well. He didn’t understand why they didn’t do so already. To him, Apple going to visual communications made perfect sense, and a way to move the industry forward. To top it all, Sagee here had similar sentiments regarding the iPhone itself more than a year ago; wishing they would add video calling to the iPhone to get our industry rolling.

Well, Sagee’s requests didn’t happen. And my friend’s wishes for the 27″ Mac won’t happen any time soon either.

And why is that? Because Apple is a cloud computing focused company that knows how to do consumer electronics very well. Their strength today comes not only from the marriage they are capable of doing between software and hardware in their products, but also from the tight coupling they are putting in place between their devices and their leading cloud service, the iTunes store.

Apple today use partners in two areas, as far as I am aware of:

1. Hardware components, such as chips (from Intel, not for long though), flash memory (Samsung) and manufacturing (Foxconn).
2. Content on their iTunes store, where they are currently involved with the music industry, movies and book/news publishers.

The only place where they are in contact with service providers is AT&T for the iPhone in the US and numerous other mobile operators around the world.

For Apple to decide to enter the visual communications market in any serious fashion will mean a need to provide the service provisioning part as well as the means for dealing with the multiple issues that occur with hosting such services on their own. And that is far from easy – here are a few examples of how hard it can be to provide voice services over IP (which are much easier than doing video over IP):

• Google decided to go out and shop for a company to get these abilities 3 times already (Google Talk, Google Voice and the latest acquisition of Gizmo5). Each time they provided additional capabilities to their infrastructure to provide VoIP services.
• Telefonica’s latest acquisition of Jajah and BT’s acquisition of Ribbit prove that it was easier for them to just acquire these capabilities than to start developing them in-house from scratch,
• Verizon partnered with Skype to provide voice services, based on the Skype network, to mobile handsets. Again, they could have put some infrastructure in place to provide the services on their own. IMHO the operators are the only ones who can really compete with Skype, and having them align with Skype looks like confessing defeat.

For Apple to decide to add video capabilities to their 27″ Macs that are similar to our very own VC240, means providing the service on their own or aligning with service providers to give this service. My feeling is that they won’t go with service providers if they do go into this market. For that reason they will need to develop service provisioning capabilities for video communications – something that is hard to do. The only other option for them is to acquire the technology somewhere and there are only a few such companies up for grabs.

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Yes, this is not an optical illusion: he now has 4 different cameras mounted on his screen.

What you can actually see on the screen is the use of 3 of these cameras in a single MCU conference using SCOPIA Elite:

1. Top right corner images are a picture-in-picture layout that the VC240 monitor itself supplies. You can see there the video coming from the MCU to the VC240 terminal.
2. The large screen in the middle is the SCOPIA Desktop client, opened in the call as well.
3. On the right side, below the picture-in-picture view, there’s a small window. This one is the video coming from the Cisco VT Advantage, which shows the remote video on the PC, while doing the voice call from the Cisco phone.

While I wouldn’t recommend this setup as a reasonable one, I must say that now the only question left is: why the 4^th camera?

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I was reading an article by Dave Michels on NoJitter and found it to be music to my ears. I think it is a great article and find his position to be similar to what I have been excited about ever since I got involved in the partnership with SAMSUNG around the SCOPIA VC240.

Dave talks about the increase of video communication traffic and views this as mainly coming from moving video onto the desktop:

“It is becoming clear that desktop video is coming. Room systems are interesting and will continue, but desktop video will explode.”

So why am I writing about this here?

In the article Dave gives many examples of desktop video products. Now take a look at the pictures below and tell me which of these would YOU want to use for your video calls?

IMHO the answer is clear – I would prefer the device with the large display, connected to my own PC. It will allow me to use my video communication device and PC as one. Oh, I forgot to mention – the name of this product is VC240.

VC240 IS Personal Visual Communications

For many years we have seen IP phone vendors adding video into the phones. I think that this has happened simply because this was the only practical cost effective way to bring video to the desktop, other than soft clients (and the difference between these 2 options is clear). The alternative of using a $8-10K executive device wasn’t a real solution for enterprises who were interested in  a massive deployment of video on every desk.

At InfoComm 2009, RADVISION and SAMSUNG changed this reality by introducing the SCOPIA VC240. Since then we have seen many initiatives of various companies focusing on video to the desktop, to the SMB market. I would predict that 2010 will be the year of personal video communication and SMB-focused video services.

Don’t get me wrong – videophones will continue to be part of the enterprise PBX, alongside the large screen personal video communication devices. If you are a PBX vendor or systems integrator who would like to add the SCOPIA VC240 to your PBX offering, we got a solution for you and will be happy to speak about it with you.

Room systems are not going away either. On the contrary – this segment will continue to grow. But we at RADVISION strongly believe that personal video communications will be the game changer, and the growth of visual communications will mainly come from personal video devices.

So say goodbye to your videophone, say hello to your video communications enabled display.

Download your free eBook guide on Video Conferencing, the Enterprise and You. Post from: Video over Enterprise

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[This time, I've asked Fabrizio Ghetti, Video System Engineer in our Italian R&D center, to provide a short list of requirements to look for when shopping around for endpoint cameras.]

When you go out to shop for a camera for your hardware endpoint design, you will be looking at a lot of brochures showing different specifications. Even if the camera may seem perfect on paper, you should personally check it on your own – make sure it works well in the environment and use-cases your end product will be operating in. Keep in mind that besides great specifications, there are some algorithms that run in the camera that can change its results and performance when used in your settings.

Before I will provide here the list of characteristics I use when selecting cameras, I’d like to note that a camera’s performance is a complex combination of resolution, lens, colors, noise, and algorithms. These will be different between camera brands, so shop wisely.

CMOS Resolution

The more resolution your CCD/CMOS has, the more details you will be able to capture in the image. This in effect will increase the depth of field and by that the 3D feeling of the video stream.

You should note that higher is not always better though, as it does come with a price – more resolution means more data for the camera to process, which means more complex circuitry, usually making the end result more expensive.

Maximum Resolution of the Video Signal

Got a camera? Make sure it has the right output signal to fit your hardware design – especially the video processing chip which will be doing the encoding.

Keep in mind that you might want to have a camera with resolutions higher than what you are capable of processing today – just to be able to upgrade the system in the future without replacing it, as camera selection takes time and resources. This is why for a system that can handle 720p at 60 frames per second you might want a camera that can handle 1080p resolutions as well.

Horizontal Field of View (FOV)

Keeping it simple, horizontal field of view is the viewing angle the camera will provide. The larger the viewing angle the more you will see of the room you are capturing with the camera. This translates to the amount of people that will be visible at once during a meeting.

A reasonable value for horizontal field of view for a room system is 70° or more. For a personal video system a good angle could be 60° or more.

Zoom Ratio

Video conferencing might require the ability to zoom in and out. This is especially true in a conference room setting, when you might want to zoom in on the speaker, or because there’s something you actually want to show or explain and the details become important. For that, you will need some zooming ability in the camera.

Optical Zoom

Optical zoom is the standard for most room systems today. It ensures that the details shown when zooming in have as little noise as possible. My advice?  If possible, always choose optical zoom if you can.

A good zoom ratio for a video conference room is 10x optical zoom.

Digital Zoom

When you use personal video systems, you usually won’t have optical zoom capabilities, as they increase the cost of the system. In such cases, you might resort to digital zoom, but not always.

When digital zoom is available, then 2x zoom ratio is usually sufficient.

Lens Quality (Distortion)

The lens inside the camera can greatly affect the image quality. One such aspect is the distortion it might introduce. When lenses are developed for a given camera, then moving it to another camera design it might not provide the best image quality – it can cause distortions.

Here’s what this might look like:

Camera lens distortion

Make sure the camera doesn’t distort the image.

Room Settings

There are different aspects related to the room settings in which your product will be deployed. Here are a few of them to keep in mind:

Dust

In some countries, powder/dust can be a big problem. If you don’t have a lens protection, then you’ll have to clean the lens before doing a video conference. Some kind of protection for the lens against dust can make sense in these cases.

Sensitivity to Illumination Conditions

At times, you will need a solution that works in low illumination conditions. Make sure to test your camera for low illumination if you expect it to work in such a scenario.

Backlight

If there’s any backlight, coming from a building window or some other source of light, check if the camera of your choice is capable of compensating for it. Make sure you do the test yourself, as almost any camera vendor has some kind of a solution for it in his camera, but the differences between cameras can be significant.

Pan Tilt Requirements

If you’re going for a PTZ camera, there are a few additional characteristics that you’ll need to consider:

• Pan and tilt angles that it provides
• Motor speed, to change quickly between different modes
• Interface it provides to control the camera’s motion (serial, infrared, etc)
• Number of possible preset positions
• Number of cameras that can be controlled by a single serial interface if they are connected to each other

Camera Brand

As every technical aspect, in the cameras market, different brands are known for different qualities: one brand is best known for its lens quality and low distortion, another brand is known for its color reproduction, while another for its reliability and assistance.

Other things to check

The list is longer than that – signal to noise ratio, frame rate and other aspects are other things you will need to check.

Bottom line – selecting a camera is a kind of an art…

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Making calls on the go

This time the idea came from a snippet of a conversation I heard the other day from the table beside me. Of course it had all to do with the (in)famous iPad, and of course it’s big (or little, if you wish) brother, the iPhone.

Someone said, in mid-conversation, that, for him, the thing you should look for in a mobile handset is to the ability to make voice calls. You know – call someone. The rest is a bonus. And his conclusion – there’s nothing better than old faithful Nokia.

Something snapped in me hearing that, as up until recently I actually believed it too. Here’s a confession: I am using a Nokia handset, provided by RADVISION, and lately I had some sacrilegious thoughts about purchasing an iPhone or maybe one of those Android phones.

Now I tell myself that it’s because of my love for shiny new objects, but it might be that I don’t really believe that a mobile handset is really a “phone” anymore. If it was up to me, I would reposition it as a communication device – something you can use for your communication needs, be it phone calls, web browsing, tweeting, instant messaging, etc..

In other words – it doesn’t have to be brilliant in making phone calls, as long as it’s great in all of the rest. Especially as phone calling becomes pretty secondary in our world.

I am not sure where that leaves me, carrying my new Nokia N85. How about you?

How do you define your perfect mobile handset? Should it be good at making calls? Should it be “web browser” based? A gaming platform? A communications device?  Or maybe all of the above?

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As our industry caters mainly for large enterprises and government agencies, a lot of the deals out there are won based on a Request For Proposal, or RFP. In a RFP, the customers outline the list of features they are looking for, and they are usually derived from or written by one of the vendors, to make sure the competition will fail to comply, due to their lack of unnecessary (not to mention stupid) features.

The use of RFPs in our industry made the competition revolve all around feature lists – not real benefits. This comes at a cost. Or as the Cranky PM complained lately:

“How? Because DysfunctoSoft has NEVER, EVER thrown out a feature, truly de-supported a platform, or dropped an obsolete product.  No matter how decrepit, bug-ridden and just FOUL that hardly-used-but-now-completely-obsolete feature is.  No matter how ridiculously costly it is to continue supporting that horrible Active X plug-in from 10 years ago. Who really cares if the thing integrates with Adobe Reader 4 anymore????”

If there’s a good example for this hoarding in our industry, it’s the video codecs issue in our products:

You’ve probably heard about H.264. Maybe even H.263. But is anyone here, who isn’t dealing working for a video company, familiar with H.261? It’s about the first video codec that was ever conceived. So old and useless, but it is frequently a mandatory item in RFPs. Why? Because nobody really needs it. But we are all forced to support it for some arcane reason.

There are more like this example, but I guess this one tops it all.

Why Should You Care?

We’re investing a lot of our time on the feature list. It takes a lot of effort and defocuses companies from what really matters to customers – bringing real benefits, trying to improve the video quality for example.

What should you do about it?

My first feeling would be to say ditch the RFP and start looking for the benefits you actually need. But it won’t work. Not in our industry.

So my real suggestion would be to know what the useless features are and decide if you really need them or can simply drop them out of the next RFP you write.

Download your free eBook guide on Video Conferencing, the Enterprise and You. Post from: Video over Enterprise

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And just to make sure we are talking about the same thing, here’s a reminder for one of my own definitions of telepresence: “The high end of the high end of video conferencing”.

Sagee had a more thoughtful definition of telepresence, which is two years old. And since we’re already delving into nostalgia, here’s another doozy from around the same time – Moz Hussain, director of product management at Microsoft estimating the size of the telepresence market:

“I just don’t believe you get mass adoption when the price point evokes the question “should I buy this or the helicopter?”. The market is limited to literally a few hundred units.”

Yap, telepresence will let the CEO ditch that company jet. But with a price tag of a helicopter, no one else will be enjoying the ride.

I wouldn’t be this harsh, but Dilbert does have a point here…

And I must say I side with Microsoft on this one – if it is to be used by only a handful of people, it makes no sense at all – it has no real impact on communications.

So is there any room for telepresence in our world of mobility, mass communication and personalization?

Yes.

Because telepresence, for me, is where the video conferencing vendors toy with new concepts and technologies – they try them out, see what works and what not, and then introduce them (through their lower-end products of) to the mass market in reasonably priced solutions.

Download your free eBook guide on Video Conferencing, the Enterprise and You. Post from: Video over Enterprise

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