What’s wrong with video conferencing?
The usual answer is that we don’t have our makeup on straight and pick our noses during conference calls, and don’t want this stuff broadcast and recorded.
I think the answer is simpler. There’s nothing to point at!
Without having something to gesticulate at — other participants, a diagram, the window — you’re left limp and lifeless. So perhaps there’s a Superman-style blue backdrop screen type of technology that can re-insert those elements.
Whatever it is, it’ll have to be pretty clever to do it.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 05:36 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/570.
Maybe screens are just too small. All that "stuff to gesture at"? Personally, I think it's called a room.
Take a six foot plasma screen, attach massive processing power (i.e., the processing power of 2012), and you have a computer for the future.
Add a tablet that you can take with you, a petabyte storage unit that's about the size of a loudspeaker, and you no longer need keyboard and mouse (but you do need a printer).
In summary, I think videoconferencing will happen, but like IPTV, when it does, so many will have tried and failed at it that it will succeed when we're least expecting it to.
So the screen would be two way, and you could either post documents to it, or gesture to printed matter you're holding.
With 3-D modelling, you could do more. Is computer holography possible? Imagine designing an airplane with a 3-D display output. Wouldn't Boeing pay for that? Wouldn't this technology devolve to the masses?
And then we can all telecommute.
Posted by: at September 23, 2005 06:18 PMPeter Cochrane stated before that people do not want video conferencing on the whole. He said they tried it in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and people did not want it. Reminds me of my first web cam. I used it for two weeks after spending £100 notes on it. I stopped using it because except in special circumstances it added nothing to the conversation, just hassle to set right. Then when I started doing video calls on 3G mobiles around two years ago, I was impressed again for two weeks. After that I stopped doing it even thought it would cost me nothing. The is no extra information in seeing video of a face I find. It just makes people feel self-aware and after that they speak self-conciously.
What is better and what I believe will come is 3D avatar modelling with lip syncing. When we can decide to be a speaking cube or whatever it will be successful. Avatars say a lot about us - why we choose to be a talking car, cube, muppet or whatever.
Posted by: at September 24, 2005 03:19 PM