UPDATE July 2021: Google Starline sounds really interesting. I’d love to get a demo. See:
https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline
https://www.wired.com/story/google-project-starline/
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A couple of weeks ago I was in Seattle and presented a slightly updated version of my “Past, Present, and Future of Video Telephony” talk at Microsoft Research Redmond.
The folks at Microsoft were nice enough to post a good-quality video of the talk on their website for public viewing – if you’re interested at all in my (somewhat controversial) views on the matter, have a look.
Email me if you want a copy of the slides or video clip.
While I’m on the subject, an interesting article in the June 2011 IEEE Spectrum describes how people respond to eye contact and mimicking of their gestures (the authors used avatars to generate simulated eye contact). As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t think avatars are a likely solution to the video telecommunication problem (at least with the current state of the art), but the idea of manipulating eye contact deliberately in a video conference is interesting – and these studies seem to provide evidence it might be effective.
I found your talk very interesting and I agree with most of your comments about the fails of present VC systems. Here’s a link to a (IMHO, I’m one of the contributors…) nice project that was focused exactly on this topic: http://www.3dpresence.org/ . As part of this project we built 3 prototype systems that on top of real-time 3D bi-directional video suggested separate videos for different viewpoints on local site. Although there were many restrictions on this prototype (cost, compatibility, number of participants etc.), as was also mentioned in your talk, it proved the importance of eye contact and gesture awareness for creating more natural (video) conferences.