I’ve been writing here a lot in praise of video conferencing, mainly from an enterprise perspective. The benefits such as travel costs reduction and inter-continental work meetings are easy to explain. However video conferencing can be used just as effectively on a personal level, for instance to bridge between geographically separated family members.
A good example for such families, separated for a long time and by circumstances that do not allow them to physically unite, are those of US soldiers stationed in Iraq. Such families have been relying on phone calls and e-mails in order to communicate. As someone who not only travels for business from time to time, but also serves in the Israeli Defense Forces reserves, I can testify that as much as I like my mobile phone and as much as I use e-mails all the time, these technologies can hardly serve as a replacement when you are missing your loved ones.
But visual communication can. Video conferencing technologies offer families a visual way to communicate, which takes those forced long-distance relationships to a new and better level. Even if it’s “only” a point-to-point (P2P) VoIP call from my laptop to my home desktop, using the web camera I packed with me, I can surely say that the experience is amazing. Now take that to the extreme, and think about using a high-end system like TelePresence for that…
Last March a few leading American corporations - including Cisco, WalMart, Verizon and the United Service Organizations (USO), joined forces to offer US troops’ families a connection to the soldiers using video conferencing technologies in a three month project called “Operation Military Connect”. Using Cisco’s Telepresence systems, Verizon’s private IP network and a SkyPort satellite uplink, WalMart was able to set up two “family gathering” rooms, which are available from April 2 to July 6, spanning through Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day and of course Independence Day. These rooms connect US families to two remote bases in Iraq.
A few weeks ago Mother’s day was celebrated in the US. Rheanna Kitch, one of the many who used the video conferencing system to communicate with her husband serving in Iraq on Mother’s day, said that she felt “like my husband was sitting right across the table from me”. This new means of communication, that attempts to bridge physical distances by displaying the participants in the meeting in life size and in excellent quality, can now help families interact with their loved ones and can even offer the ability to hold “virtual” family events, such as birthdays, weddings or taking “virtual” family photos.
First Lt. Clayton Cole, for instance, was serving his country in Iraq when his daughter Jill was born. Unable to take leave, Cole was able to see his daughter, her proud mother and older sister, using a video conference system offered by a non-profit organization called Freedom Calls Foundation. It would’ve been very hard, if not impossible, to set up such a moving reunion using any other form of communication.
Soldiers serving in a far-away country a long way from home may be an extreme case of physical separation, but in today’s global world almost anyone can think of a similar personal example. Having the ability to visually connect and bridge the physical distance can surely help in these cases, particularly if the video conference quality makes one forget, at least for a short hour, about irrelevant things like technology and communication.
So this is another post in praise of video conferencing and it seems that the personal gain from this technology may even overshadow the economical benefits I previously discussed. One can argue that bringing families together should be considered as a benefit even on an enterprise level, and that enterprises should offer such technologies to their employees traveling overseas or relocating, which is another reason to vastly deploy video conferencing systems in the organization.
[This post is written by Ariel David, Video Technologies Expert in RADVISION’s Networking Business Unit. Ariel has close to a decade of experience in video technologies and has embedded systems for video and image coding, video enhancement technologies and the management and development of integrated solutions. He can be reached at arield@radvision.com]
High definition (HD) is everywhere. If you haven’t read about it in one of the posts here, you probably saw it featured in a commercial. If you haven’t seen any commercial, you probably heard about it from one of your friends, who bought a new TV set. HD is the next big thing. The question is not if HD will spread globally, but rather if we have really stopped to consider all the implications of HD?
Cisco Telepresence TV Commercial - Just for fun.
When it comes to video conferencing, there are now enough endpoints out there that support HD to admit that the market has completely gone to high def. I’m not talking about outrageously expensive conference rooms. I’m talking about commoditized HD endpoints, from vendors like LifeSize or Aethra.
Most users would definitely enjoy the HD experience. In ideal conditions it is a definite “WOW”, especially when compared to the small, not to say blurred SD experience (and HD sure makes CP look better than ever). It’s bigger, it’s sharper, and you can see details you’ve never seen before.
That’s why the video conference world has “jumped” to HD (actually skipping middle resolutions such as 4CIF). Modern endpoints and MCUs support up to 720p. Some even support 1080p. But a very crucial part of the puzzle was somewhat neglected. Bandwidth, which is necessary for the transmission of video over IP, hasn’t progressed as fast as the endpoints. Actually, it’s not only a matter of progress, but also of price. In other words, bandwidth is expensive.
If bandwidth is expensive, compression becomes a necessity. The video encoder is the unit responsible for compressing the video to fit the bandwidth requirement. In an ideal world this encoder would have unlimited compression ability, with no implementation problems or any visual artifacts. Therefore, a video in any resolution can be sent over any given bandwidth with no effort at all.
Unfortunately, back in the real world, even the most advanced state-of-the-art encoder used today - H.264 - has many limitations, in terms of compression, complexity and visual artifacts. The reason it is considered the most advanced is due to its ability to compress the same video at the same visual quality to half the bandwidth required by previous encoders (such as MPEG2, H.263, MPEG4, etc.).
Still, for a good quality (or, God forbid, superb quality) 720p resolution, 30 frames per second (fps) video conference scene (known as “talking head”) compressed with H.264 you probably need at least 1.5-2 Mbps (that is Megabits per second). This means that an HD endpoint that sends a 720p resolution video stream would require a guaranteed 1.5-2Mbps bandwidth. I must warn you that this is a ballpark number, as it depends very much on numerous factors (such as the quality of the camera or lens, the quality of the encoder, the complexity of the scene itself), so take it with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, the graph below shows the visual quality that the end user can expect with a given bandwidth using H.264 encoder.
Visual quality resolution vs. bandwidth using a H.264 encoder for SD
It is very clear why CIF/240p and 4CIF/480p resolution are still the most common resolutions today. For example, a good quality video at CIF/240p would require a 512Kbps link. This is something most users can afford. This would definitely be the norm, if video conference becomes very common in the enterprise and there will be many video conferences running in parallel in the enterprise network. Even a good quality 4CIF/480p video is still affordable in most cases. Around 1Mbps is also not that much to “pay” for good quality video.
Frame sizes comparison for CIF, 4CIF, 720p and 1080p
Jumping to HD introduces a very “nice” jump in bandwidth requirement. I suppose this should be quite obvious as there is more than twice as much information in a 720p picture than in a 4CIF/480p picture and 5 times more information in a 1080p picture. For something a bit more staggering, 1080p has more than 20 times the information in CIF. All this can be seen very clearly in the graph above. Still people usually tend to forget this and expect good quality HD to consume somewhere around 2Mbps. But even with 2Mbps per user, assuming there are many video users and conferences in parallel, the enterprise will have to invest a lot in its IP network.
Visual quality resolution vs. bandwidth using a H.264 encoder for HD
Now let’s make the final and painful leap to 1080p. If you invest in a 1080p endpoint, you probably expect superb quality (and not only a “good” one). This minor experience will cost you somewhere around 6Mbps.
I am guessing that seeing the required bandwidth for 720p or 1080p makes it crystal clear why the HD video conferencing is not spreading that fast and is still more of an executive toy rather than a mass communication tool. Most enterprises, even if they can afford an HD endpoint and the associated connection, can most probably not afford this in high volume. This means that at best there will be only a few HD endpoints in some of the conference rooms in the enterprise, maybe a few for the executive board.
There is also another issue. If we look at the larger scale, the video conference market today is still filled with SD (CIF or 4CIF) endpoints and the common links between sites range from 384Kbps to 2Mbps. An enterprise and/or user that has invested in HD, expects to get “the HD experience”, but is strongly affected by his peers - other users that attend the same conference and other users in the same site that share the same bandwidth capacity. For instance, a participant connecting with a low-end endpoint, using low resolution or low bandwidth will send poor quality video and will look bad even on an HD endpoint. Actually it will look even worse on the large HD screen. Eventually, the HD users will be reduced to poor quality, not because of his endpoint or connection, but simply because of other participants in the conference.
But still, HD is next. If it is not here now, it’s definitely on the way. HD-enabled MCU’s and endpoints are being released by all the leading vendors and prices are dropping. Everyone agrees that soon HD will become a commodity. But bandwidth is a problem and it seems that it will remain a problem in the future. So, for all those who want and are ready to invest in the HD experience, PLEASE don’t forget to invest in bandwidth. It’s as important.
So the cat is out of the bag. That is the Cat 2.0, out of the bag of Steve Jobs. Last Monday in San Francisco Apple’s CEO showed off the new version of the iPhone. While it offers a host of new games and web services, the new devices does NOT have a front facing video camera, nor does it support video conferencing (unless you take the “video conferencing kit” seriously…). And that’s despite the many rumors and protocol debates.
Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone 2.0 in WWDC 2008. (CC)
The reasons for not supporting video conferencing are probably the usual (suspects):
Hardware: 2-megapixel sensor with no video capability, weak CPU. These, of course, can be fixed but then Apple has to support numerous hardware variations.
Battery life: Judging from the way my Nokia 6120 is drained after I use the camera for video it makes sense.
Pricing: If they are replacing the CPU and sensor, the phone will be more expensive.
The iPhone is no doubt the coolest gadget out there, but it is certainly not the only mobile handset in stores, nor is it the most popular. Still, as the video conferencing market is looking for that killer application, that one niche that would make this market boom, a video-enabled iPhone could’ve been something to look forward to.
The only light I see in that long tunnel in Steve Jobs’s presentation, is that Steve Jobs and Apple are soon to be replaced by a big developers community using the iPhone SDK. And with all due respect to people in Nokia, Samsung or Apple, the handset wars we see today are really not that interesting. In the long run it will be the users and developers who will determine who will win the mobile handset war. And as handset vendors (should) think of the users first , I am sure they will move their phones in the right direction, that is, the moving picture direction.
When I was a child, if I wanted to meet with a friend in the afternoon for some unplanned quality time, there were basically two options: the direct one, where you would call his home phone and hope he’s there (or at least that his mother knows where he is…), and the indirect one, where you just wander around the neighborhood and hopefully run into him. Oh, life was much simpler then.Two break-through concepts emerged since then, and totally changed the way my son, for instance, would probably be looking for his friends:
The mobile phone, which enables you to talk to (almost) anyone (almost) regardless of their physical location (and just ask “Where are you?”).
Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, the world’s first commercial mobile phone. Remember?
Combine these two concepts, mobility and presence, and what do you get? Always on connectivity, meaning you’re always connected and your “presence” is always updated. For instance, we are using Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) in RADVISION, and so I can check the Communicator tool and see the availability and location of every RADVISION employee world-wide (pending they updated it using Microsoft Outlook). I can use this information to call them using their preferred method of communication or just send a short chat message, and it will reach them, either in their office, home, meeting room or internet café.
Another cool example of mobility and presence is Fring, a cool mobile application I’ve been using for a while, which manages your virtual presence (among other things) over mobile data plan or WiFi, using popular IM clients, such as GTalk, Skype or MSN Messenger (or all of the above). I can be on the go, and still appear “online” to my friends and colleagues, so that I can be reached using chat or VoIP call.
Mobile presence may be a fun thing for your social life, and applications like twitter which combine mobility, presence and social networking have already gained a lot of popularity, but mobile presence on an enterprise level may prove to be crucial for corporate life, even if they may make us “too connected“. Unified Communication systems can harvest this valuable presence information, especially if always-on, in order to optimize the use of communication methods in the enterprise, to the benefit of all users.
The best of two worlds? Twitter over Fring - a short demo.
For instance, you can have one phone number (single access number) for each employee, which will reach his mobile, office or home phone, according to the employee location and desire. Or you can use instant messaging, which will be translated to either chat messages in his IM client, e-mail message if he’s only using e-mail, text message (SMS) on the mobile phone or even a voice mail message (using text-to-speech). And, of course, you know if the person you want to call is available to accept the call or not (and maybe his geographical location).
Presence-based and mobile unified communications in the workspace means employees can collaborate in real-time across multiple workspaces. It means workforces can be mobilized to home offices and remote workspaces, and it means that employees can use them anywhere, anytime to get updated, communicate and contribute.
Snapshot of my own personal communicator. Hey, I’m available…
So nowadays you are where your presence information says you are, and as long as you have an internet connection in your close proximity, and as long you are carrying a means of communication (mobile handset, handheld device, laptop), you are available for some playful games in the neighborhood. That is, if you don’t have anything more important to do now that you’re “connected”. Oh, how life was so much simpler back then…
Personally, I think Video Conferencing is something every enterprise, and every employee in the enterprise, can benefit from (not just the shoe-maker…). Nevertheless, it is quite obvious that different enterprises, and more specifically different employees in the enterprise, have different needs, and therefore have different needs for video communications.
Due to these different needs, and also due to the different roles employees have in the enterprise, different employees use different video conferencing equipment: Top executives may use high-end, expensive video conferencing units, such as the LifeSize Room, with high definition video and audio and a dedicated high bandwidth line; Company meeting rooms may include multi-screen, multi-camera high-definition video conferencing systems; Managers may be using lower cost video conferencing endpoints, sitting on their desks; Employees who do not use video conferencing often may be using software-based video conferencing applications, like, using web cameras and their personal computers, and utilizing the regular data bandwidth, to extend visual communication to the desktop.
Corporate video network topology, an example.
Looking at this complicated mash of different video conferencing equipment, one may wonder how a video conference is even being conducted, as the diversity in capabilities - image size (resolution), bit rate, choice of video and audio codecs, etc. - is so broad. A low resolution endpoint can’t interwork with a high resolution stream and a high bandwidth endpoint will have trouble communicating with a low bandwidth endpoint. Lastly, if endpoints use different video codecs, the call will not be successful.
The choice of video codec is a “weak spot” in the whole concept of video communication. One may argue that today most endpoints support H.264, the latest video codec standardized by ISO and ITU-T (considered to be the best known codec out there), but life is far more complicated. Some old video conferencing equipment (legacy) do not support H.264. Some endpoints still support H.261, which was standardized eighteen years ago; some use H.263; Mobile handsets support MPEG4 and H.263, and only now start to introduce H.264. Popular instant messaging clients, such as Office Communicator or Skype, use proprietary video standards.
Of course none of these standards are backward compatible.
Evolution of video standards.
In that case, believing that a video conference will work out seamlessly requires a great deal of faith. Who - you will probably ask - is responsible for the “magic” that you see every day in your enterprise, when employees simply call into the conference, without any worries? Well, the Babel fish in the middle of the enterprise infrastructure is the video conferencing bridge, the MCU in video conferencing jargon.
MCU, short for Multipoint Control Unit, is the network entity that is responsible for translating between different endpoints. Therefore, it should be the one capable of not only accepting and understanding every endpoint (no matter what it is and what characteristics it uses) but also translating it to any of the other endpoints in the conference, in a process called Transcoding.
So when a top executive is using his high-end conferencing unit, sending a high definition 720p resolution, using H.264 as video codec and a 4Mb per second bandwidth, to call a manager on his mobile handset, sending a low resolution stream, using MPEG4 as video codec and a 64Kb per second bandwidth, the MCU is working very hard in the middle to transcode the streams.
A reliable MCU does not force any restrictions on the endpoints connecting to it. This means that an IT manager can choose whatever kind of endpoints to use and expect the good old “plug and play” scheme to work. Designing such a product therefore introduces complicated interoperability issues, on top of “just” testing new endpoints in events like the SuperOp. Backward compatibility issues, for instance, are a big pain, as you are required not only to support, for example Microsoft, to support your old versions, but have to support old versions of products from other vendors, that may be used somewhere by some client.
Still, the Babel fish works its magic and as a result, video conferencing usually works seamlessly, as long as you selected a good MCU. Different users connect, different equipment is used and everyone is connected to one, big, successful conference. It may seem like something that requires a lot of faith, but the Babel fish in the Tel Aviv offices of RADVISION proves video conferencing does exist. QED.
Video conferencing is reaching out to everyone, including the desktop. Still I am often confronted with the fact that video conferencing has been “the NEXT big thing” for more than a decade, and has yet to become a truly popular means of communication (like, for instance, the mobile phone). Researchers have found that there are a few problems - primarily psychological - that may explain the slow penetration of video conferencing into our lives, and also the reluctance of many users to add video into their communication-filled lives.
One of the problems highlighted by many researchers was the quality of the video (image size, frame rate, bit rate, etc.). Before the long-awaited HD became a reality, low resolution video conferencing was very far from supplying a close-to-real experience, and many of the advantages of using a video system were lost. This, of course, is not a real problem anymore, particularly with Telepresence.
High definition Telepresence-like video conference. Source: LifeSize.
Now we move onto the next problem, the “real” problem - maintaining spatial faithfulness. Spatial faithfulness is a term used to describe how attention cues, such as gaze and gesture, are transmitted over virtual space. For more than four decades, research has shown that non-verbal cues, such as gaze, gesture, and body posture, convey a lot of information which helps us conduct effective conversations with our peers.
Albert Mehrabian and others have shown that what we verbally communicate only explains roughly 7% of the impression we leave. The other 93% of communication is attributed to non-verbal cues. This means that if a video conference system does not preserve these cues, the impressions in the conference are at risk.
The limits of a single viewpoint
Most video conferencing systems use a single camera. This means that everyone shares the same view, and so everyone shares the same perspective, without any ability to direct non-verbal cues only at a certain participant. Therefore, important non-verbal cues like gaze and gesture are almost completely lost. Therefore simple tasks in real-life conferences, such as determining whether the speaker is looking at you when he is asking a particular question, are becoming complicated, if not impossible. Even the latest Telepresence systems, which use up to three cameras and screens, still use the same concept of a shared perspective and consequently do not address this issue at all.
Maintaining eye contact
Another part of the challenge to maintain spatial faithfulness is solving the gaze parallax problem. Research has shown that gaze (eye contact) is one of the most important non-verbal cues responsible for monitoring the other participants, regulating the conference and expressing feelings and attitudes. However in many cases, especially when using a low-cost video conferencing system with a simple webcam as a camera, the positioning of the camera (usually on the top of the screen) creates a big difference between the actual gaze and the perceived gaze. In order to look at the screen, the participant must look down, which makes his gaze behavior become totally different than what was intended.
Milton Chen (pdf) has shown that the correct placement for cameras is at the position of the eyes and they can be up to five degrees higher before the gaze parallax is perceived. Most video conferencing systems, even the latest and greatest, do not comply with these restrictions. However Telepresence, for instance, uses strict camera positioning help with eliminating the gaze parallax and improving “in-person realism”.
Interesting work has been continuing; both in the industry and academy; to try and come up with a truly spatially faithful video conferencing system: one that preserves the non-verbal cues as much as possible (see Multiview by David Nguyen for a good example). Just as high definition systems are becoming popular and solve one of the barriers for using video conferencing, hopefully innovative concepts and “out of the box” ideas for solving the other barriers mentioned above will soon influence commercial video conferencing systems.
Having true spatial faithful video conference systems will enable video conferences to become not only an important and effective means of communication, but also something for the masses. Until then I will continue to preach my preaching, for all the good reasons of course. The next big thing is right around the corner. Use your video conference systems to take a look…
On Monday Frost & Sullivan published the result of a recent analysis of the video conferencing systems market (pdf). Frost & Sullivan point out the growing need to support a wide variety of devices and networks, with high definition on one end of the scale and desktop video on the other (including the support of collaboration software from vendors like IBM Sametime, Microsoft OCS, Cisco CUVC or Alcatel-Lucent MyTeamWork). Bringing the conferencing room to the desktop is a must, according to Frost & Sullivan, in today’s visual communication market.
Pricing is considered by Frost & Sullivan as another important factor. It’s true high definition (HD) video is considered high-end, but most video conferencing users will use desktop applications or standard definition (SD) endpoints and so expect to pay much less for infrastructure that will support them. The flexibility in supporting a mixture of HD and SD users in the same conference using a pricing model that takes that into account is a big plus, according to the analysis.
Reaching out to the desktop is no longer just a slogan, according to the Frost & Sullivan analysis. Users want to use their PCs and laptops to access the same video conferencing system as their peers, especially when they are at home or on the road. Same goes for connecting using a mobile device. In a virtual working place there shouldn’t be any difference between employees in the enterprise premises and those who are traveling, not in quality of service nor in ease of use.
Vendors therefore, according to Frost & Sullivan, should be looking to develop solutions that have freely distributed software clients (with built-in firewall traversal capability, which enables you to connect to the video conferencing system without using any VPN solution), that are easily installable, and that provide data collaboration and video features that are compatible with other video conferencing devices.
I am always baffled with praises. Still, I feel that I am indeed part of a wonderful solution to a major challenge to today and tomorrow’s working environment, and I am glad that others feel our offering is different, innovative and presents a true solution to the problem.
It’s amazing to me how while some areas of our lives have dramatically changed with technology, others have basically stayed the same. I was thinking about it when I recently took a short professional course in some technical college. The learning experience, which I experienced in class for 3 days, was not that different than what my late grandfather probably experienced in his days in the “heder” (Yiddish for a religious elementary school) in Poland some 80 years ago. It can and should be different.
One can argue that my grandfather wasn’t sitting in front of a computer, in an air-conditioned room, watching a PowerPoint presentation. This is all true, but the basic experience hasn’t changed: a class, listening in real-time to a teacher, no advanced capabilities whatsoever, not even those we are becoming accustomed to in other areas, such as the ability to listen again to some question, the ability to expand a certain topic, or the ability to attend the lecture from afar.
This, of course, is what e-learning is all about. Short for “electronic learning”, e-learning is a general term for any form of learning in which teacher and pupils are separated by either space or time, and the gap is filled using technology. Such technologies - collaboration tools, screencasts, and video conferencing systems with a Presentation mode - have existed for a rather long time, and yet e-learning has not spread and remains a nice-to-have rather than a must-have.
About 7 years ago I attended a totally electronic course, in the Open University of Israel. This meant that pupils attended numerous “virtual” classes across the country, while teachers taught from their PC or a designated studio. All classes were recorded, and could have been re-played from any desktop (using a student ID and password, of course). All class material was digital, class tasks were delivered using e-mail and even the grades were published on-line. I can’t emphasize enough how convenient, effective and easy it was to learn this way, and how difficult it is to return to the “old” way of learning.
Why should students, especially in higher education, be forced to attend a physical class?
Why should students settle for the teachers that are currently present in their city or country?
Why should teachers need to attend a class, and limit themselves to teaching classes in their physical surroundings alone?
Why should students take notes, and why can’t they watch replays of their courses?
And I am not just talking about academic education. A significant portion of enterprise life is training. You train new employees, you train employees on new products, and you train your sales people, your customer support staff, and your developers. Today, and even in the most sophisticated organizations, training is done the old fashioned way. Employees are sent across the globe to deliver training sessions, presentations, lectures, while others travel a long way to attend a sales meeting, a conference or a professional course.
E-learning
The solution to all of this is, of course, leveraging existing technology and daring to think “differently”. It involves a short-term investment in infrastructure, but saves a lot of money in the long-run when educational institutions become truly virtual. Learning via video conferencing means that there are no physical borders - you can attend any class, hear any professor and acquire every piece of information you may seek. Using an interactive whiteboard means that data can be displayed anywhere, and any written information can be reproduced and saved digitally. Using an information system for posting and reading articles, exercises, class notes and relevant reading material enables everyone to be updated, to learn at their own pace and to utilize the information given in the best way possible.
I am proud to say that the e-learning revolution, in Israel at least, has been given a strong boost two months ago when the World ORT organization helped create some 60 “smart classes” in six selected junior high and high schools, each featuring interactive white boards linked to an international video conferencing network. This is part of the “Kadima Mada” (Go Science) program, which was launched one year ago to raise the level of science and technology education in Israel.
First Israeli “smart classes” on Israeli Public TV
Many higher education institutes and enterprises, who now offer little, if any, electronic classes or sessions, are likely to become more involved in e-learning as the cost of electronic-based educational systems keep decreasing. As standards evolve in this field (see SCORM, for instance), and as technologies are developed and matured, communication tools, such as Wikis, forums and blogs are becoming commonplace. Of course, as video conferencing becomes a popular means of communication which everyone is enjoying, we should expect e-learning to become the way to learn in the near future.
And maybe then, in twenty years time, when my son attends that very lucrative program in some hot-shot university in China, without ever leaving his room of course, I will be able to say that this is something my late grandfather has never foreseen, when he was busy learning the Torah in the “heder”. Un Shoyn…*
One tends to not give any time to interoperability. Interoperability (or “interop” for short) is defined as the ability for two components to work and communicate together. We encounter interoperability all the time and everywhere, even if we never stop to think about it.
You can call my mobile phone without worrying about the manufacturer of my handset (or yours) and the call will be connected. You can send me an e-mail and I will be able to read it most of the time regardless of your e-mail system or mine. You can read this post using practically any Internet browser. All of these examples are made possible by high-quality interoperability.
Good interoperability does not come easily. It’s the result of hard work. This hard work focuses on three main areas:
Standardization
Acceptance and/or enforcement of such standardization
Investment in interoperability testing
The mobile phone serves as a good example of this: there are clear standards that well-define the “simple” action of setting up a mobile phone call. These standards are accepted and enforced, and there is a great deal of investment by handset manufacturers in interoperability testing. The result is an excellent user-experience in terms of interoperability (which means that you are rarely bothered by it).
A different example is that of video streaming, particularly on your mobile phone. There are so many different standards (video standards, media encapsulations) to choose from, that the chances of the client and server to converge are slim. Most service providers and handset manufacturers use proprietary or incompatible versions of the standards and don’t comply with any enforcement of such standard. The investments in interoperability are very low - it comprises of checking your system with one type of content. The result, as I can testify from numerous problems I have encountered in this area over the years (take the 3G Ring Back feature, for example), is an awful user-experience most of the time and one which makes you aware of “interop.”
What surprises me is the lack of interoperability that exists in many of today’s most important communication products. How can one communicate without interoperability? I presume that if your products are considerable and substantial enough, you can succeed for a long time without following typical standards. Microsoft has been successful with their Internet Explorer and Cisco (as well as other Telepresence vendors) discourage users from trying cross-vendor conferencing.
The lack of interoperability, in these communication products as well as others, displeases the users and eventually harms business. Therefore IE8 will enforce HTML standardization because all Telepresence vendors are working on interoperability with non-Telepresence equipment.
The “Super Conference” in SuperOp! 2007, Ancona, Italy. Photo: Amnon Cohen-Tidhar.
Interoperability means working with your competitors towards a mutual goal, which is a peculiar concept in the very competitive world in which we live. Still, most companies in most markets have realized that working together, sharing and even helping one another, can make the difference between a strong, growing market and a complete failure.
The video conferencing market is quite evolved in this regard. Standards have been present for more than ten years. They are well-accepted and there is little tolerance towards proprietary solutions. Most importantly, many companies invest heavily in interop. This is done all year round in the labs. Every time I step into one of the RADVISION labs, I am amazed by the variety of products and vendors that reside side-by-side there. Still, they frequently complain about what they are lacking.
Still, testing existing products is not enough. If one wishes to innovate, one requires the ability to test future products, even prototypes, with peers. This is why the annual SuperOp!, which has taken place over the past 10 years, organized the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium.
The author participating in SuperOp! 2005, hosted by Aethra. Photo: Avi Shauli.
The SuperOp! is a testing event that hosts engineers and developers from most companies in the multimedia communication industry. The event is held in different venues across the globe, and provides an opportunity to test intensively with most vendors of IP and 3G communication.
I have participated in SuperOp! events before and they I’m always impressed As SuperOp! is strictly an R&D event, the atmosphere is very pro-active and comfortable. You get to meet your peers, promote your products and even have a good time.
This week (May 11-16) RADVISION is hosting the 10th SuperOp! event (pdf) right here in Tel-Aviv. So if you are coming I can guarantee you a good time - even the weather will be great. Hopefully the tests will be as pleasant, and everyone will leave a lot more knowledgeable than when they arrived.
SuperOp! 2007 attendees having a good time in Ancona. Photo: Amnon Cohen-Tidhar.
Interoperability is quite Sisyphic. The work never subsides and new products for testing (and to test with) arriving all the time. But the benefit - a seamless, plug-and-play video conferencing experience that provides the user with the luxury of not knowing what “interop” is - is definitely worth it.
I’ve previously discussed how Telepresence is making Teleportation seem closer than ever. But there’s another cool invention, previously available only for Star Trek crew members, that is making its way to our desktop - The Holodeck.
If you are not a Star Trek buff, here’s a brief explanation: “Holodeck,” short for Hologram Deck, is a virtual reality system, evolved sometime in the not-terribly-distant future (the 2360s), which transforms an empty room into a virtual world, including props, characters, background, etc.
The Holodeck is not available for sale (yet), but watching the demo below, by Mitchell Kapor, one of the original investors of Second Life, the famous internet-based 3D virtual world launched in 2003 by Linden Lab, using a 3D camera to control Second Life without the use of a keyboard or a mouse, looks very promising.
The demo uses a 3D camera, designed by 3DV Systems, a very cool Israeli start-up, that developed a camera which senses the distance in real-time between the camera and the objects in its field of view, at a high speed and a high resolution. The camera, as you can see for yourself, is not different than a regular webcam, but enables the user to use their body to control the characters in the virtual game. Yes, you simply jump and your avatar jumps too, run and the avatar runs, turn and the avatar turns with you.
The camera translates motion into movement in a virtual world, such as Second Life. The demo is just a game, but the possibilities for this are huge. Low-priced 3D cameras are on their way, not just for gaming but for corporate use as well.
IBM has just recently announced a partnership with Linden Lab to create enterprise-class versions of Second Life behind the corporate firewall. IBM believes that these secured worlds would be an attractive place for employees to use as a business platform - train employees, conduct meetings, brainstorm and do practically anything they normally do in the real world, only using their avatars and bridging over limitations of distance and time.
Jim Spohrer, director of service research at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, told VentureBeat that IBM researchers have already built an application that allows employees to hold online collaboration sessions to solve real-world problems. Mitchell Kapor believes that conferences in Second Life would be as close to the real experience as possible. Both sound to me like they are talking about the Holodeck.
In the corporate Holodeck, one can meet, interview and recruit potential candidates, without forcing them to physically travel to the corporate premises (Second Life has already hosted two job fairs); a corporate Holodeck will allow you to hold virtual trade shows, seminars and conferences for potential customers in multiple venues simultaneously and on demand (Unisfair, another of those terribly interesting Israeli start-ups, is already showcasing virtual events like this); You can train your employees on the Holodeck, just like in Star Trek; And, of course, you can have virtual meetings in virtual meeting rooms, where you can communicate, collaborate, and innovate.
Lt. Tasha Yar training on the Holodeck
So even if you are not a Star Trek fan, the Holodeck may be of interest to you in the up-coming years. If it helped Lieutenant Tasha Yar train in martial arts, help simulate complicated events and medical emergencies, just think about what it can do for the average corporate starship…
