« June 2005 | Main | October 2005 »
July 20, 2005
Video Conferencing in Your Pocket
(Hmm, that title may sound a bit suggestive, but don't worry, nothing of the sort follows! )
With all the globalization and telecommuting and people simply communicating far away on a daily basis, i found myself wanting a better way to communicate. As you might know, i'm collaborating with two other friends to create an online magazine, called LOST. They're both in one city, and i'm about 12 driving hours away, which makes face-to-face conversation difficult. We chat mostly over email, sometimes on the phone. But i still feel that a conference call would be better, to get everyone's opinion during the same conversation. Even better, a video conference would be best, to make it as personal as possible. Now you say, "well, you can already do that Matt!", and indeed, you can. Just put together a computer, a USB camera, some video conferencing software, and a fast internet connection, and voila! ... you've got one. Much better than the technology was 5-10 years ago, surely. But this blog isn't about 'good' things that are current, is it? :)
The caveat to the above setup (and the situation of being geographically separated) is that we are also becoming increasingly mobile people. Cell phone sales are off the charts, and i personally don't even have a land-line anymore. At work, home, or play, wherever those happen to be, you can get in contact with me -- audibly. Want to see me tho? Uh, let me take a fuzzy picture of myself with my phone's camera and email it to you (very slowly over my phone's 'Net connection...).
So, getting back to the main point, in order to video conference and be a mobile person too, you'd either:
a) have to carry your notebook around with its camera and wireless (perhaps cellular) internet card, and set it up and take it down whenever you moved around;
b) have to somehow simultaneously (or with a second phone) take pictures of yourself every second and email them to your conference buddies (like a crude motion picture) AND find the brainpower to hold a conversation...
As you can see, not the best solution (as far as i know, which is what you readers/commenters are for). But, imagine if you *could* video conference with your cell phone, with it taking video of you automatically and streaming it to your meeting attendees, while you only had to think of what to say.
"Outrageous!" you say? Well, consider two things. H.264, a new compression standard for video, is creating low-bandwidth, high-fidelity video that is perfect for conferencing. Second, third-generation cellular networks (3G) have been overdue in the U.S. for a long time, but they will be coming. Combined with H.264, this will provide a large enough datastream (from 384Kbps to 2000Kbps in CDMA2000 and W-CDMA) for H.264 to run quite well.
Then you could walk around (or sit down in a park, please), holding your phone out in front of you, seeing the person's head (or people's heads, maybe a scrollable menu of heads!) on your screen, while you see their's, and talking and listening via a little Bluetooth earbud (that you see so many bigcityfolk using). Cool, huh? Yes, this will require those things i mentioned above, plus a significantly powerful cell phone processor. But when i see phones being advertised that have 150Mhz processors and 32MB RAM, playing nice-looking driving games, all on a tiny full-color screen (yes, tiny -- remember, we're not asking it to decode HD video here), i can see this being not too far down the road.
Posted by MaTT at 12:34 PM | Comments (1)