You’ve got to love Twitter. When I started this series of posts, I got a request from @ucexpo to discuss interoperability:

While I don’t see interoperability testing (IOT) as a hardware issue, I will try to share some insights on how we design the IOT for our BEEHD product.

BEEHD is a software solution we offer. It is designed to help developers develop HD video communication devices. It is suitable for a large range of client products and, in a sense, this series is targeted as a quick guide for such developers who use BEEHD and are designing this kind of hardware device.

The main concept behind BEEHD is that all application related functionality, not including the user interface, is taken care of. This includes communication, media coding, management, and yes – interoperability too.

And so interoperability is taking a considerable time and focus from our R&D team. As RADVISION takes pride in the interoperability of its products, they need to deal with a wide range of visual communication products, and make sure they interoperate with the BEEHD.

A room in one of our interoperability labs

I like dividing these products into several different categories:

• Type
• Resolution
• Protocol
• Amount of testing

Type

That would be the type of the product we are testing against. I like placing such products in broad groups:

• IP Phones – these are phones that sit on the desktop, capable of doing audio calls. While the end product being developed is a high definition video endpoint, it should be able to communicate rather well with voice only devices. This means that this type of a device needs to be tested for interoperability as well.
• Personal Video Phones – simply put, these are IP Phones that do video as well. Some call them videophones, others call them multimedia phones.
• Desktop Clients – these are standalone applications that run on a PC. They do video conferencing or only audio sometimes. While desktop clients usually won’t be capable of doing HD video, they are still an important part of video communication deployment these days; so taking care for interoperability with them is important.
• Executive Video Phones – SCOPIA VC240 falls in this category. They are high end, large displays that provide video conferencing capabilities. They can be either stand-alone, closed product, Or, a PC monitor that doubles as a video phone (as with the VC240).
• Codecs or Room Systems – the majority of the video conferencing market involves this. It’s a kind of a set-top box with a connected camera that does video calling. Connect it to a monitor and to a microphone pod and you’re good to go.
• Telepresence – the high end of the high end. Telepresence is a very expensive room system.
• MCU – a Multi point Conferencing Unit. The real added value in visual communications comes in large meetings with several participants in different locations.
• PBX or UC system – the servers that connect everything together.

Resolution

We’re dealing with high definition. And yet… there is a huge amount of equipment out there that is capable of smaller resolutions only. And you need to deal with them and interoperate with them as well.

This is why when we select the equipment to test against, we try to cover different devices that support different resolutions – these vary depending on their capabilities – and these differences affect interoperability.

Protocol

There’s this nagging issue with the protocols used for testing. Some endpoints today only support SIP or H.323, but others support multiple protocols. You need to test them all and not focus on one – there’s no telling what your end customer has deployed.

You should also know that video will behave a bit differently in SIP and in H.323. This is because certain signaling is expressed differently between these two protocols – the capabilities of the endpoint and the request for a video fast update. Make sure you test both.

Amount of Testing

You can’t test everything with all the equipment out there – it’s just too much.

The degrees of freedom are endless – there’s the testing of signaling, of different voice and video codecs, in different bandwidths and resolutions, with and without generating packet loss and latencies. And that’s just what comes to mind without much thinking.

It means you’ll have to trim down the amount of testing you do.

My suggestion is to have several testing profiles – from the minimal sanity of an hour or two, up to the full testing of a few of days, per endpoint. Once you have the profiles defined, have the list of equipment you are testing match the different testing profiles. Focus on doing the majority of the tests on the equipment that is most important to your business goals.

Bottom Line Here!

Testing your videophone product?

1. Make sure that the vendors providing you with the video conferencing solution have done extensive interoperability testing.
2. Validate what level of interoperability testing they are doing – only codec level, signaling only, or a whole system test.
3. It would be wise to receive detailed reports of such testing.
4. Test on your side as well – make sure you have at least some of the equipment in your own labs.

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

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It is no secret that video conferencing today is mainly limited to conference rooms. If your company is global, or at least has a few branches that are located far one from the other, you probably have some video conferencing endpoints in your conference rooms. If you have a big meeting, with people from far away, you might even be using the equipment. But that’s about it.

Cisco TelePresence System 3200. Source: Cisco.

2009 was very interesting in that respect. It was a year that video conferencing finally got a well-deserved focus, but also a year where high definition video and audio finally left the conference rooms and started appearing on people’s desktops.

It doesn’t really matter if it’s a software client you’re running on your laptop, like our SCOPIA Desktop, or a hardware endpoint you put on your desk, like the SCOPIA VC240, and who cares?!. You can now enjoy a high quality experience, not really different from those fancy telepresence systems (remember what Hans Chrisitian Anderson taught us?).

If you examine any of our other means of communications, none of them require us to leave our desks and go into some room, just because that’s the “communication room”. Just imagine your life without an e-mail client on your PC, where you have to go to some e-mail room to check your mail and compose messages. We use e-mail clients on our mobile phones, from the coffee shop, from the airport, from home – is video conferencing that different?

Well, it isn’t. Once you get used to having a video conferencing client everywhere – on every PC, on your mobile phone, and, yes, in every meeting room – you realize that this is the way it should be. That is if you believe that video calling is a valid means of communications, if not an important one.

I believe that if video conferencing will become valid, and the recent year has certainly proved we’re going there, dedicated video conference rooms, that – as Tsahi put it – “can only be used for video conferencing” have no future.

With all due respect to the excellent quality and homogenous environment, these are things that can be solved in other ways, which will eventually infiltrate the mainstream video conferencing endpoints.

And if you regard these telepresence benefits, you are left with only disadvantages and barriers for adoption. After all, fancy video conference rooms are not anyone’s target, they are simply a means. A means of communication. And if we can achieve a much better level of communication and collaboration in the organization, as well as between organizations, there shouldn’t be any reason to stay locked in those telepresence rooms.

But you don’t have to take my word on it: On one hand, a recent Wainhouse Research survey showed that most organizations have less than 100 room system deployed. In fact, 34% have less than 25. On the other hand, a recent Gartner report says 200 million workers world-wide will run corporate-supplied video-conferencing from their desktops by 2015, compared to 7 million in 2008.

This means that in a couple of years everyone will have video conferencing on their desktops (or desks). This means there will be no real motivation to leave the desk and go to the meeting room.

Unless, of course, it’s a meeting, with lots of people from the same physical location. Then, just like we do today with any other means of communications, we will go the room, spend the first ten minutes on chit-chat and go ahead with the conference, with video (using a REAL room system) or without.

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

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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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In that “John the Plumber” post I’ve written last November, I was referring to the bandwidth challenge, but bandwidth is not – surprise, surprise – the only challenge facing mass deployment of video conferencing, for there is also an issue of capacity.

In John’s original post, he estimated approximately 115 endpoints for every 1000 employees. Out of those 115, 100 were desktop clients. IMHO, a real mass deployment should put a desktop client on every desktop, thus increasing the magnitude to approximate 1K endpoints for every 1K employees.

This means that we, as an industry, will have to support thousands of potential customers, most of who are HD users. This is quite a challenge in terms of scalability, for today’s hardware-based conferencing bridges, as the rule of thumb in HW solutions usually is, “more users – more hardware”.

On the other hand, software-based bridges, which can handle a great number of concurrent users, are quite limited when it comes to capabilities, especially when you are talking about high definition H.264 video with SVC tools for every user (which are already available, for instance via our desktop client).

There are a lot of arguments regarding “the best approach” to all this. In some cases – where the deployments are small, simple, homogenic – a software solution may be the best solution. In other cases – where the deployement is heterogenic, large-scale, distributed – hardware seems like the only way to go.

I must admit that I myself have been contemplating this Hardware-Software conflict for a while now. I believe that the solution is, as it usually is, a hybrid of these two “philosophies”. In other words, it’s all about a balance between HW and SW.

“Get The Balance Right” by Depeche Mode

The HW-SW Balance

In one of their many classic 80’s hits, “Get The Balance Right”, Depeche Mode wrote:

“Don’t take this way, don’t take that way
Straight down the middle until next Thursday
Push to the left, back to the right
Twist and turn ’til you’ve got it right…”

Finding a right balance is very true in regards to many things in life, HW and SW conflict included. Such a balance you can find in our Solution Version 7, which was announced at InfoComm 09. The basic philosophy behind it is to give every user, in every scenario, the best possible experience.

What this basically means is that if HW will give you the best solution for your next call, you will use an HW port. If SW will give you the best solution, you will use an SW port. And by “best” I mean optimal in terms of quality of experience as well as cost of experience, as SW ports are much cheaper than HW.

If you are doing a point-to-point call with SCOPIA Desktop inside the organization LAN, there shouldn’t be any need for HW. On the other hand, if you are connecting SCOPIA Desktop with some endpoint and transcoding of some kind is necessary, a HW port may be needed.

In the above illustration, you can easily see how some endpoints connect to the MCUs (the SCOPIA Elite and the SCOPIA Elite 1U) in switching mode (SW) without transcoding, which means that the MCU can support a very large number of users. Others require transcoding (TRX), and so the same MCU can cater to their needs. The conferencing bridges connect to each other using either SW or TRX, depending on the user’s case.

All of this put together means that users can enjoy the best of both worlds. And the number of bridges necessary for your deployment is dependant only on the user requirements. As this solution allows users to get the right balance for them between HW and SW ports, they can succesfully deploy their video conferencing infrastructure: one that is massively deployed, offers great quality of experience, is cost-effective and is totally managable.

So there you have it – You don’t have to decide. You don’t have to “bet” on this side or the other. You can just twist and turn and enjoy the great balance we now offer.

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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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A few weeks ago a tweet sent by David Ohayon got me thinking. David wrote (in Hebrew, sorry!):

“Once people thought video calling would be the future. The future proved that people would give up even regular calls for text messages”

This, in fact, was tweeted just when I was reading a very interesting article in physog.com called “A facial expression is worth a thousand words“. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, found out that we are able to recognize facial expressions in motion (for example, in a movie) far better than in a static photograph.

That, of course, correlates to my impression of how video conferencing, which brings the user facial expressions, gestures and body motion, is a richer and much more profound experience than any audio call (or e-mail).

So how can both of these contradicting facts-of-life co-exist? How can it be that while I’m amazed on a daily basis with how much richer visual communications is, even I seem to spend a rather great deal of time writing SMS messages instead of calling, short e-mails instead of meetings and tweeting instead of blogging?

I think that we are looking into two different experiences here, both of which become extremely important in our personal and professional landscapes: on one hand, staying on top of everything, despite the ever-increasing flood of information; on the other hand, collaborating in effective and meaningful ways with friends, peers and colleagues.

KISS and Make Up

2009 was a year that proved that “the message is the message”, to quote the very interesting New York Magazine article about Barack Obama. It was a year where the wonderful data flow of real-time information convinced everyone that this is what the future will look like, but at the same time showed us that we are very close to a dreadful overflow.

The common solution, or so it seems, is keeping it short and simple (KISS). Short blog posts (which I simply can’t seem to write…), short micro-blogging messages, short and simple bottom lines, even short URLs.

And so it does seems like a waste of time to hold a phone conversation, when a short e-mail is sufficient. And if the matter can be solved via an instant message or a SMS, it’s even better. If you find, at the end of the day, that you haven’t spoken to anyone but still managed to get your work done, don’t be surprised. It’s the 21^st century, baby.

A Global Marketplace

On the other end of our lives, collaboration becomes essential. Everyone knows that the Internet has turned the world into one big global village, but to harvest this power you need effective ways to communicate and collaborate.

Google, first with their Docs suite and just recently with their Wave prototype, have proved that people can collaborate without any need for physical proximity. The ability to co-edit a document, share thoughts, share videos and images, communicate through video conference – all of these make the world not just a global village but a global marketplace.

It seems that everyone is working on enabling to collaborate better, as close to a “real” physical collaboration or even better. Giants like Microsoft and Cisco, Video Conferencing vendors, Consumer Electronics vendors, start-ups, you name it. I suspect that this trend will continue in the next decade, up to a point where physical proximity will be regarded as redundant.

Inter-personal communication is a very interesting subject. “Remote” inter-personal communication, which means communicating with one another using various means of communication, without actually being in physical proximity, is even more interesting to me. And the last decade has been extremely exciting in that manner.

Using SCOPIA Desktop on a Mac for video conferencing and chat

And so, although quite contradicting in nature, both of the ideas I started this post with are very true and valid in today’s inter-personal communication world. The more choices we have for communication, the more options we have in making contact. The “trick” is to know which one to use and how.

In professional language this is known as “effective communications”. But this is really a subject for another post.

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

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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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Our personal computers are no more just desktop machines that are used for browsing the internet, playing movies and music and chatting.

Real time communication, more virtual appearances and meetings, the need for better quality video-on-demand services – all of these have has increased the global thirst for speed. While many developed nations still strive for a better service, the Asian counterparts – like Japan or South Korea – have already over headed and are ready to face the future of personal computing (and living), where just an internet connection will not do.

The Next Gen of Personal Computing

Here are some of the features of the next generation of personal computing:

1. Video streaming services like YouTube, Hulu and Netfix would offer more featured downloads, in high-end formats like HD and Blu-ray.
2. IPTV, HDTV and UHDV would offer unlimited number of channels using broadband networks.
3. Video conferencing and telepresence services will help us connect to anyone, anywhere in the world, and will allow us to work as if we are in the same location. This is known as real-time collaboration.
4. Simultaneous functionality of bandwidth-hungry applications, such as digital cameras, personal video recorders, smartphones, home video editing equipment, laptop computers, HDTVs, PDAs, home monitoring systems and other smart appliances would require at least 90 Mbps running in every household.
5. Online- and Cloud- based gaming will allows multiple users to compete in high definition graphics gaming from the comfort of their homes despite residing in different locations.
6. Virtual Sports will allow gamers and sports persons to compete with virtual competitors. Japan and South Korea has already added them to their national gaming lists.
7. Tele-consultations, Tele-pathology, Tele-surgery, Remote medical imaging and Grid computing would expand medical research and treatments.
8. Virtual classrooms, multi-campus collaboration, digital content repositories, data visualization and virtual laboratories will be the next generation educational systems.
9. Upload and download of Giga-pixel images, which allow for in-depth zooming of every minute data, needs even more accelerated speeds. Also web applications, like Google Maps or Google Earth, require trillions of bits to capture every square inch of earth in street-view resolution.

Street View on Google Maps Demo.

All these next generation computing and digital media cannot be established with the current availability and speed of broadband offered. As it clearly shows from the figure in the beginning of this post, even leading western countries, such as the UK and the US, fail to provide the bandwidth needed for next generation video-based services.

Technological innovations drive customers to require increasing speeds and greater capacity. Deployment of faster broadband connections will provide more positive benefits for business, education, entertainment and society. The future networks will impact the lives of the citizens on a daily basis and help them to operate virtually but with a real-time experience. And it should materialize as soon as possible, because the future of personal computing is already knocking on our doors.

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You can see many indications to this trend, coming from all over the place, with IM vendors moving strongly into video and video conferencing vendors integrating IM capabilities. But the real deal here is not just integrating both IM and VC on the same system, but supplying the user with a unified experience, where instant messaging can easily be escalated to video calling and a video call can become a video conference easily and intuitively.

If I look at my daily use of these means of communications, IM has become the de-facto standard to start a conversation, or at least verify that the person on the other line is available, as it holds presence information. Now I have a variety of options:

• Continue with the IM chat
• Move the conversation to the telephone – this requires calling (again)
• Escalate the IM chat to video – most IM clients support that today, assuming the other side has video capabilities too.

This makes a lot of sense in the 1-on-1 call scenario, as all options don’t require that much of work to setup – a phone call or a video call. But when it comes to a 1-to-many scenario, things look a bit different – audio conference using the telephone is not trivial and the experience is not that great; upgrading the IM chat to a video conference is usually a BIG headache, as most IM clients do not support currently multi-party conferencing, not to mention that “traditional” VC users can not join the conference.

Initiating a Video Conference from the Chat box

So on one hand, instant messaging has become a primary means of communications (and more so – initiation of communications); on the other hand, the mechanism to launch audio and video conferences from the IM clients is missing.

This is exactly where a new patent, U.S. patent 7,631,039, granted to RADVISION on December and announced publicly yesterday, comes in handy. The RADVISION patent allows users to initiate such conferences in the comfort and ease of their IM clients, using the existing address book and nothing more.

The patent covers the initiation and support of audio and video conferencing using instant messaging. It allows a user to initiate a video conference from his IM directory or from an on-going IM session. Such a video conference can be initiated in response to an instant message sent between two or more clients, and participants can then join the conference by any of several possible communication means. For example, a user may join a conference using a desktop client or a dedicated high definition room system, using standard protocols such as SIP or H.323.

Visual Communications (illustration).

An interesting piece of trivia regarding the patent is that it was drafted a few years ago (2001), and it foreseen quite remarkably the current trends in the real-time communications industry. I believe that in the upcoming months, the fruits of this innovative way of thinking by RADVISION will prove to be both extremely useful and productive for both instant messaging and video conferencing users.

I believe the IM and VC worlds are destined to merge, and when the combined experience – visual communications – becomes a must-have means of communications, the ease-of-use and effectiveness offered by this new idea will be greatly appreciated.

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Innovation in the video conferencing market usually involves, like in every aspect of communication, both sides. Whether the calling scenario is point-to-point or endpoint-to-bridge, rolling out advances in technology and great features is something you must do in both the bridge and the endpoint. To make a long story short, in order to solve the innovation puzzle correctly, you need all pieces.

I must say that in the last few years it’s been kind of a struggle, trying to get our partners and competitors to cooperate with us in bringing such innovations to the market. As part of this understanding, and as part of our desire to bring a full solution to our customers, we announced in 2009 our desktop conferencing system, the SCOPIA VC240, and version 7 of our software client, SCOPIA Desktop.

Completing The Innovation Puzzle

But as I explained last week, if you know the business, a real solution is not complete without a REAL room system. And so, last week we announced we acquired some assets from Aethra, a high-end room systems manufacturer and a long-time partner of RADVISION. This will allow us to complete our offering, and deliver our innovative solutions to a greater audience. If you want, this is the last piece in our innovation puzzle.

Take, for instance, our SVC technology. As I explained here various times, we developed our technology with interoperability in mind. This is why we are able to support both our SVC-based endpoints, in software and hardware, and the rest of the world, without any need for any gateways or any other proprietary components.

But in the near future, with a complete SVC-based portfolio, utilizing an array of endpoints that cater to everyone, from the laptop to the meeting room, we will enable a complete SVC deployment, bringing the greatest benefit to our customers.

Putting Innovation Back Where It Belongs

Remember Tsahi complaining about no real innovation in video conferencing endpoints? Well, I have to say I agree (I already said it, actually). For the last couple of years it was mainly marketing and sales that were in charge of the innovation – in the terms we use and in the pricing. It’s about time, I guess, we put the innovation back in the user experience, where it belongs.

It’s about time we had a room system that supports SVC. It’s about time we had an endpoint that can connect through the public internet effectively, delivering the same quality of experience as those connected via managed networks. And that’s just a few examples needing innovation. There are many more.

I hope that in 2010 this will dramatically change, and in return will change the way video conferencing looks and feels, in our conference rooms and outside of them. That’s one puzzle we ought to solve, and the sooner the better.

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[Ever since we started discussing desktop video conferencing as a valid option for providing the entire work force with video conferencing capabilities, including telecommuters and employees that are out of the office, I've been getting a lot of questions regarding this new and ground-breaking concept.

There's lots of confusion around this, and people are pretty much preaching what they're selling: complicated SVC codecs, fancy HD cameras, state-of-the-art next generation CPUs.

Just recently Scott Wharton, CEO of Vidtel Inc., suggested we recommend the "perfect machine" for a "soft" client implementation - the right processor, graphics card, external webcam, etc.

And so I've asked Vincent Chavy, a guy that needs no introduction here, to use his vast experience, as a long-time veteran in the desktop conferencing industry, and give the expert advice on this one.]

It Is All About The Processor….

Well, sure thing, having a decent processor is very important, but why? And at what point does it stop being important? Is a 16 cores processor (as shown in the image below) going to give you 1080p at 120 fps?

First of all, the process of encoding video costs more than the process of decoding video. A fair estimation is that it takes 4 times more CPU to encode a video than to decode it, at equivalent resolution, of course.

Multi-core processor machines are interesting, because the same cache is shared between multiple cores. The encoding process can therefore be shared between multiple cores in a more optimized fashion. Read, you can encode more! So, in theory, the more cores the better, but there is of course a practical limit.

If you want a machine to encode and decode High Definition 720p at 30 fps, a machine with an Intel i5 or i7 Core2 Duo processor will do fine. If you are more reasonable, and can settle with sending VGA at 30 fps and receiving High Definition 720p at 30fps, a machine with an Intel Core 2 duo 2.4 GHz will just be perfect (note that I said Core2 Duo and not Duo Core). In these recommendations, I of course take into account the fact that users want to keep some engine power to do those other minor stuff, like browsing the web, checking emails, and instant messaging with others while participating in a meeting.

You may notice that I recommend Intel’s processors here. That’s because our video codecs are highly optimized for the Intel platform, leveraging the low-level Intel libraries which provide the best performance for those processor-intensive operations.

Some stats, including CPU Usage, from our SCOPIA Desktop client in a 720p@30 call.

Come On, It’s all about the camera…

You can now get an extremely good USB camera, with amazing specifications, for a very decent price. The good old days of 160×120 at 5 fps are happily gone (see below for an amazing blast from the past). Today is the era of 720p at 30 fps… and more!

So yes, the camera is very important. And the driver – very important too. And the settings of the camera are even more important.

A blast from the good ( ? ) old CU-SeeMe days.

There are 2 variables that are critical when testing and selecting a camera: capture size (and aspect ratio) and frames per second (fps).

Most of the cameras on the market will capture up to VGA 30 fps. This is the case of almost all the cameras embedded in laptops and desktop screens. There are a few USB cameras that “claim” to capture 30 fps 720p.

So, why is it so hard to do 720p at 30 fps when you can now get a cheap camcorder doing 1080p? Well, the big limiting factor for USB camera vendors is the USB Bus speed, which is limited.

Classic mistakes (user errors, if you prefer) include using a low speed USB hub or plugging in your camera in an old USB 1.0 plug. If you want to get the best of the best of your high performance camera, make sure it is plugged on a high speed 2.0 USB plug, directly on your computer. Oh, and of course, all USB devices usually share the same BUS. So if you wondered why your camera is slow when you are doing your weekly backup on your USB drive… Well, you now know why.

Let’s do the math: an image of 720p (that is 1280 by 720 pixels), is composed of 921,600 pixels. A pixel is usually coded using 24 bits, so capturing 720p at 30 frames per second means 921,600 * 30 * 24 = 663.5 Mbps. And guess what is the maximum speed of a USB 2.0 BUS? 480 Mbps.

To overcome this limitation most camera vendors are now compressing the image before transmitting it from the camera to the PC. So the video stream acquired from the camera is now a compressed stream instead of a raw stream as it was before, and compression introduces some loss in quality.

Fancy things on the camera also affect the frame rate. This includes digital zoom, automatic light correction, as well as all the funky moustaches and hats you can digitally add to your image. Capturing and sending 720p at 30 frames per second is a serious business. One parameter off, and the punishment (either on image size or frames per second) will be immediate. So we recommend turning off all settings like face tracking, automatic adjustments in low light environments as well as any automatic configuration (auto focus, auto white balance) that makes the video pulsate. In short, any configuration with the word “automatic” in it is suspicious.

One last warning – as mentioned above, the camera driver is equally important. So make sure you always have the latest and greatest from your camera vendor.

To be complete, I should mention that there is an alternative to USB Cameras. You can buy a video acquisition card, and use your camcorder or any other compatible PTZ camera. Although this is something that has some value, I believe that for the cost it implies, you will be better served by a solution like the SCOPIA VC240.

Hey, Don’t Forget The Graphic Card…

The graphic card and the graphic card driver are key to the video rendering (display of the video) process. A weak graphic card or an outdated graphic card driver will result in high CPU usage when rendering video – and well, this is some precious CPU cycles that will not be available for the video codec.

Since it is now rare to find a bad graphics card, the one you have in your computer should be fine. It is however a good idea to verify that your drivers are up-to-date.

What is going to be very interesting is to see the role of graphic cards in the future of personal computing, especially their GPUs (Graphic Processing Unit). With technologies, libraries and framework like Open CL, Microsoft Media Framework, ATI Stream or NVIDIA CUDA, a lot of the video processing or pre-processing will be possibly handled by the graphic card. Meaning that the GPU will be helping the CPU a lot more than today.

OK, Then – What IS The Perfect Desktop Video-Conferencing Machine?

Well, if you are ready to settle with sending VGA at 30fps and receiving 720p at 30 fps, a good laptop (Core2 Duo 2.4 Ghz or better) will do just fine. The camera embedded in your laptop is most likely good enough as well. A lot of my colleagues are using their DELL XPS Laptop, with the embedded camera and have a great videoconferencing experience.

If you want more, then you need to aim for an i5 or i7 processor machine with windows 7 and with the best of breed camera (Logitech 9000 or Microsoft Lifecam Cinema HD).

To end with a personal note, I am attending almost all my meetings from my MacBook Pro, and I would not trade it for any other machine. I am more than happy with sending VGA, and I have to say, that – sometimes – I would even prefer sending less… like CIF, god forgive!

I was never told “you need to shave” until high definition arrived. I was never told “gosh you look tired” in the CIF days. Remember, with desktop video conferencing, you are right in front of your camera, so your audience WILL see that you were partying last night. But that’s an issue for a different kind of post…

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At around the same time as that post, I written about what telepresence is and what it is not. In a nutshell, ever since Cisco announced their Telepresence system (end of 2006), Telepresence has been distanced from “plain old” video conferencing as much as possible. The PR basically argued that video conferencing failed, and telepresence is the next big thing.

And the PR worked. By the end of 2007 most video conferencing vendors re-branded their high-end systems as “telepresence”, totally blurring the definition of telepresence. Then came “affordable telepresence” , “personal telepresence” (previously known as “executive systems”), “home telepresence”, whatever.

Personal telepresence with granddad?!

Telepresence – Out , Personal Telepresence – In

Wainhouse Research recently released a research note titled “The Telepresence Vanishing Act“, arguing that the telepresence as a market segment is disappearing, as it is not a real product or a product category, but a different “experience”. As the “standard” video conferencing systems, the room systems, are evolving rapidly towards 1080p video and big displays, as well as paying much more attention to lighting, acoustics and camera issues, the room system experience is converging with telepresence.

And if telepresence is no longer a big hype, and if the price ain’t right, there’s no surprise that at the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 most vendors have rolled out low-cost telepresence-like systems. Cisco and LifeSize were probably the pioneers, back in 2008, with the LifeSize Room 200 and the Cisco Telepresence 500, delivering an impressive feature set with a reasonable price tag (The Room 200 was priced at $16,999). It was/is not telepresence, but a rather nice-looking HD video conferencing system. But go argue with marketers.

And with that “market it now, worry about the results later” spirit, and with price becoming an issue and telepresence losing its clear definition in the market, came the latest hype: “software telepresence”. Yes, there’s no mistake here – I’m talking about a software client, running on some kind of personal computer, marketed as “telepresence”.

You know by now I’m a big fan of desktop conferencing and collaboration infrastructure. After all, we are very proud of our software client. But sorry – desktop conferencing is NOT telepresence. And while it’s great to take a hit at Cisco, and comparing the low price tag of such systems to that of Telepresence, it is like comparing cherries to watermelons…

The Real Deal: Compatibility and Interoperability

Take, for instance, the latest release from Vidyo, the software video conferencing start-up. They recently announced the VidyoRoom HD-220, with a price tag of $6,995, claiming it can replace the $250,000 system that Cisco sells.

Dave Greenfield from ZDNet’s Team Think points out to the real deal here – it’s not the 1080p or the 60fps that counts; it’s compatibility:

“What’s still needed is a way to coordinate all of the different high-end video system. It’s not just a matter of supporting the H.323 video either…

Then there’s having to coordinate all of the other components that are possible in a video conference – screen display, acoustical mapping, screen display and the like. Vendors have different ways of implementing and then managing these exchanges.”

And, of course, there’s interoperability.

“All very nice, but the big issue here is compatibility. A video system that connects with one or two other offices is far less useful than one that interoperates with every webcam on every desk…”

And if I may be blunt here, there’s also the issue of the overall design and the logic behind the whole thing. These “software-based” solutions look just like they sound: a weird-looking server, with external components that don’t really fit the over-all design.

So while the server in the picture above looks ok, and has an appealing price tag, you may notice it misses some basic components. You know – the microphone, the camera, the data sharing cable. Yep, you’re expected to shop for the separate external components on your own. It’s just what Tsahi warned us about in a recent post – peripherals are a big headache.

Why Cheap Costs More

Just imagine going to a car dealership, and being offered a car with a great price tag, only it misses a few simple external components – wheels, gear, engine. But you know – any wheel will work here, and we support a variety of gears, and everyone sells engines these days. Would you buy such a car at that dealership?

Impressive as the price tag is, when you add the few necessities, such as an HD camera, a high quality microphone system, high quality speakers and a VGA connector (at least), such a video solution can cost more than $30,000. Or at least that’s what Dave Greenfield says.

And the bottom line: it doesn’t just feel like a mess, it also looks like one. Just compare the “complete” server-based solution with the slick Lifesize Express 220, that has everything built-in for less than $7000, and you’ll get my drift:

There’s an old Jewish saying claiming that “cheap costs more most of the time”. And while I strongly believe in affordable solutions, when it comes to a room system you better choose a room system grade solution, and not something that comes near and is marketed as such.

A software client is a software client, a room system is a room system, a telepresence system is a telepresence system – they each have their own characteristics, their own benefits, their own drawbacks. So don’t let the marketing people confuse you. Understand what you need, and choose appropriately.

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“There are many methods for predicting the future. For example, you can read horoscopes, tea leaves, tarot cards or crystal balls. Collectively these methods are known as “nutty”. Or you can put well-researched facts into sophisticated computer models, more commonly referred to as “a complete waste of time”

As 2010 begins, it’s predictions time again, when everyone who’s writing anywhere must give their predictions for the up-coming year. I will not disclose here my methods for predicting the future, but will share with you what I commonly refer to as “my educated guess”:

1. Video Calling and Video Conferencing Will Merge Into Visual Communications

Video calling is getting more wide-spread and more buzz, especially now that Skype is making a lot of noise in CES. On the other hand, in the enterprise front, the video conferencing market is still quite secluded from the IM/Video chat hype. In 2010 I suspect that these two islands will finally meet and merge, and the result would be a better, more complete experience – the one we like to call visual communications.

2. Video Calling Will Be In Everybody’s Homes (And Not Just Their Desktops)

To continue from the last prediction, video calling on the desktop is becoming something everyone is using, thanks to Skype, Google and their likes. But 2010 seems to be the turning-point where video will leave the desktop and move into the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, the restroom, you name it. Calling someone using video would be just like calling him on the phone, only better.

3. IT Will Have Their Hands Full With Bandwidth Issues

As video calling will become popular and as visual communications becomes a reality, IT managers will have to deal with bandwidth issues in their enterprise networks. Bandwidth management – in the endpoint level, in the bridge level and in the management level – will become a must, if visual communications is to be successfully deployed in the entire organization.

4. Everyone Would Have Their iPhone App

Video conferencing? Video calling? Video anything? – there’s an app for that. 2010 will be the year where every player in the market will come out with their own iPhone app. What will these apps do? We’ll have to wait and see. But in 2010 the business reality will be: you have an iPhone app, therefore you are.

5. Scalable Video Coding (SVC) Will Not Become The De-Facto Standard

SVC is great. SVC tools do wonders to video conferencing. But 2010 will not be the year that the market will switch to SVC-based solutions. SVC-based endpoints and SVC silos will be deployed, but the majority of enterprises will use either non-SVC solutions or a hybrid of SVC and non-SVC.

Bonus: A Bunch Of Stuff That Won’t Happen This Year

B2B Video Conferencing will not be solved. 1080p will not become the de-facto resolution. Cloud-based video conferencing will not become popular. Social media will not penetrate to the enterprise. Mobile video conferencing will not happen. The iPhone will not have a front-faced camera (yet…). Software-only MCUs will not become popular. People will still not reach an understanding about what telepresence is.

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The Android OS is out for quite some time. Recently it was decided that we should bring our SIP Stack revolution to this uncharted world It was a challenging task, which only a few can take: . a new operating system, to add to the many that our stack already works with. I boldly took the responsibility on myself, and I emerged triumphant. Well, kinda.

The First Hesitant Step

The heavy-duty work was done by our Common Core team. They are the experts in porting our OS-abstraction layer APIs to work with new operating systems. This layer helps us, the rest of the developers, to work without directly interacting with the OS bits and bytes, pipes and ports and whatnot. So what’s the big deal in another OS to port to, right? All you have to do is RTFM. Such an easy job those Common Core people have….

Therefore, after this “unimportant” phase, it was time for me to work my magic. Of course, with the help of our Common Core team, again. Why? Because the Android’s way of compiling code is quite different than the one we usually use. The first thing I had to do is check out the documentation of the Android’s Makefile system. It was buried deep in the NDK documentation (<NDK_INST_DIR>/docs). That took me some time. Or at least that’s what I told my boss when asked about my slow progress.

We’re On It, Baby

So we were done with the porting, and we knew how to name the android Makefile (android.mk – Ingenious!). Our system started humming and making start-up sounds. Now came the hard part: should we force Android developers, our existing and new customers, to work our way (and as god intended, if I may say), or submit ourselves to Google’s will?

The thing is – if you wish to compile your code, you need to place it under one of the Android NDK folders. You can’t just place your code anywhere you want, as you used to with *nix or Windows. You must have at least one anchor well placed under the environment tree. Out of generosity, we decided to let Google win this time.

After some additional steps (write a JNI wrapper, place an Android.mk file in almost every folder, etc.), we were able to compile everything. Experts as we are, it all ran smoothly the first time we tested it. That is, if you agree to call that time we tried it, after 3 weeks of continuous debugging because of crashes, the “first time”. But what are 3 weeks compared to eternity, right?

So What You Should Do

If you’re going to develop some code under the Android platform, there are some things you should know. First, you’ll need to download and install the Android SDK and NDK. You should also write some pieces of JNI code that will connect the Android GUI to the C code you’re writing. It will also be a good idea to download and install Eclipse, and then install Android ADT plug-in for Eclipse. For more information, you might want to read this article.

Conclusions

It was a nice experience. People actually thought I work on Android (I didn’t. Remember the OS-abstraction layer?) and I could see them gather in the corridors, whispering about the cool job I have. Hey, if they are already staring at me, I rather think this is what they’re thinking.

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