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October 23/2003
The Wainhouse Research Bulletin
ANDREW CHECKS OUT TELIRIS (ANOTHER HIGH-END VIDEOCONFERENCING SYSTEM)
“In WRB V4 #22 (June 2, 2003) I reported on a visit to a TeleSuite room in NYC. Well last
week I got to see another high end videoconferencing system in NYC, this time courtesy of
Teliris, a UK-based total solution provider. For those with an unlimited capital expense
budget and who can afford to devote 5-20 Mbps of bandwidth for a video call, the Teliris
VirtuaLive™ solution provides an absolutely superb telepresence experience. The guts of
the VirtuaLive™ videoconferencing solution are based on very low latency MPEG2
encoder/decoder devices running at about 4 Mbps over ATM or TCP/IP transports, custom
broadcast quality cameras, and a next-generation user control system in which the user
selects how many sites are on the call and how many people are in the room, and the
system takes care of the rest.
Another key ingredient of VirtuaLive™ is Virtual Vectoring, an interesting concept that you
have to experience to understand. Virtual Vectoring creates a realistic orientation and
interface among users by consistently maintaining eye contact and sight lines among
participants in a meeting. In essence, you have one camera, codec, and display for each site
in the conference (and at each site) - so the same image is not sent to more than one site.
The result is that the display system presents each user to the others in the proper aspect
ration, size, and orientation. It’s as if you are all in the same room together. Combine this
with low delay and high video quality, and you start to get the picture. Virtual Vectoring
also includes a technique which Teliris calls dimensioning - the complexity associated with
creating camera placement, site lines etc. that are dependant on the number of rooms and
number of participants in each room. This includes guidelines for the maximum number of
individuals that should appear on each plasma screen, a tracking system for cameras so that
the cameras can adjust automatically to address changes to these criteria, etc.
My Comments:
The TeleSuite room was actually a “room inside a room” where the cameras and
microphones were hidden from the user and great effort was made to present lifesize
images in a sophisticated display system that made if feel like the others were sitting across
the table from you. But the demo I saw in June was based on standard products and
technology (Polycom VS4000 codecs). The Teliris situation is quite different. The
displays are “vanilla” plasma displays, and the table and microphones are ordinary as well.
(The lack of wideband audio was a disappointment to me with the Teliris demo).
However, the low latency, high quality video, and the natural affect of the Virtual
Vectoring system produced an astounding experience. Of course there are some obvious
limits – besides cost; you gain the benefits only when calling another Teliris room,
although you can gateway out to a standard H.32X system.” |
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