Telepresence is videoconferencing at HD quality, despite all the marketing hype around it. It has its advantages : high quality video (compared to the ones we used to have over ISDN, wow !) and high quality audio (with echo cancellation in all directions). Combined with large LCD screens it indeed gives a “near-life presence”. But you need an installation with quite a lot of equipment (for a studio, multi-screen environment) and consumes a fair amount of bandwidth (and we can deliver you some on top ;-).
When you look at it from a distance, you see that what the vendors did was combining technology coming from the consumer world (LCD screens, HD TV, video cameras) and business applications (videoconferencing, Microsoft Outlook, VoIP). And the combination is a success (you should visit one of our telepresence conference rooms at Belgacom). As I was thinking about this, I remembered seeing John Chambers from Cisco saying that he always had a mobile phone and a Flip pocket videocamera (they acquired Pure Digital for 590 M$ in March 2009).
This led to an “aha erlebnis” ! Now I understood suddenly why Cisco was looking into consumer digital cameras. They may be willing to bring telepresence technology to PC platforms (they actually do) or to the portable camera itself. In the first case you connect the camera to your PC and you have a HD quality image. In this last case you can imagine having the camera over Wi-Fi and having a videoconferencing from wherever you are in your house, without complex setups. Finally, they might as well integrate some 3G mobile technology and give us a mobile videoconferencing station that fits in a pocket or any PC bag.
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