Video conferencing
It’s been a long time coming, but in the final stretch, video conferences sprinted to the finish line… almost. When they first came out, they were expensive, cumbersome, choppy, and hard to find. And now our top-of-the-line video conferencing systems have come far, but they are still expensive and cumbersome. Be expectant, the future is just around the corner.
Two way virtual meeting
In 2008, you can pop up a little video window on your computer using a free chat/instant messaging window – having first bought a thirty dollar webcam, of course. It’s small and choppy, but free and easy. You could also spend around a hundred dollars and get a nice webcam and use a video conferencing service. This is a good option for clear, smooth video conferencing. It’s a far cry from a floor to ceiling screen with resolution so good you can count freckles, but unless you have half a million dollars, it’s as close as you’re going to get.
Conferencing technology
Despite having said that, we’ve come a long way in just five years. Small and choppy video was all you could really get back then, and now we can get decent quality and sound, inexpensively and easily. Imagine what it will be like in five more years.
Even so, to get there, we have to extensively use what we have now to justify progressing the medium. Like a mom telling us to finish our greens before we can get dessert, to get insanely good video conferencing for everyone, we have to show that there is a demand, a need to encourage developers to make things better and cheaper.
Uses and tools
The good news is that collectively, we are already doing this. Hospitals are a prime example of cutting edge video conferencing being put to use. Doctors in hospitals across the country or world can discuss a particular diagnosis instantly via a video conference. In some hospitals, screens attached to motorized bases roll around the halls of medicine controlled by doctors in their offices or homes. They follow-up with their patients, look for complications, discuss further treatments, etc. and roll to the next room.
More importantly, video conferences allowed for real-time collaboration of all commanders in one session. Splice in real-time video from the front, and a clearer picture of what to do is formed.
