If you were to design a 'telepresence' product

[cyclist]

...what would your focus be? What (subjectively) are your hot buttons? What is most important?

Call me a purist, but this latest generation of lower end (yet still quite expensive) products simply do not cut it. As an industry, we are reverting back to the very thing that people hated to begin with - VIDEO CONFERENCING!

Here are a few items of importance to me.

1. Camera location. Camera height is important because we don't want to see the forehead or neck of the endpoint people. Horizontal placement is equally as important for eye contact.

2. Number of participants per screen. It's all well and good to be able to tell a potential client that your system can accommodate XX amount of people. What they won't tell you is that the people will end up the size of peas on a 42" tv.

3. Symmetry on screen. Basically, this means I am not a fan of pan tilt zoom or tracking. If you see a bunch of pea heads on one screen, but one huge head on the other, who will you pay more attention to?

There are several more items to cover. Data collaboration, how you instigate a meeting, lighting, comfort, etc. In my opinion, these issues and others are secondary to being able to actually have a meeting with someone and have it not be a glorified telephone call. Obviously, an attractive product would be nice as well, pushing as far away as possible from the old "tv on a cart" product.

Feel free to share your ideas. Feel free to disagree with everything I just wrote.

[Lumpy]

...what would your focus be? What (subjectively) are your hot buttons? What is most important?

Call me a purist, but this latest generation of lower end (yet still quite expensive) products simply do not cut it. As an industry, we are reverting back to the very thing that people hated to begin with - VIDEO CONFERENCING!

Here are a few items of importance to me.

1. Camera location. Camera height is important because we don't want to see the forehead or neck of the endpoint people. Horizontal placement is equally as important for eye contact.

2. Number of participants per screen. It's all well and good to be able to tell a potential client that your system can accommodate XX amount of people. What they won't tell you is that the people will end up the size of peas on a 42" tv.

3. Symmetry on screen. Basically, this means I am not a fan of pan tilt zoom or tracking. If you see a bunch of pea heads on one screen, but one huge head on the other, who will you pay more attention to?

There are several more items to cover. Data collaboration, how you instigate a meeting, lighting, comfort, etc. In my opinion, these issues and others are secondary to being able to actually have a meeting with someone and have it not be a glorified telephone call. Obviously, an attractive product would be nice as well, pushing as far away as possible from the old "tv on a cart" product.

Feel free to share your ideas. Feel free to disagree with everything I just wrote.

I'd have to start with "latency" and "depth". You're really not "telepresent" if there's a 3 second delay. Seems to me it has to be as close to "real time" as electronically possible to be effective. Point to point at 186,000 miles per hour would be good! Starts with the latency for me. More later....

Lumpy