Video Immersive variations

There are several basic modes available today for Video Immersive environments that have significantly different predicates and display modes:

1. Big wall environments for multiple-person conferences -- these are thought of primarily as the heavily hyped and expensive HP Halo and the Cisco Telepresence "rooms". The basic configuration -- six people in three blocs of two people -- on "each side" of a wide video wall is set up to approximate two groups of people who are not proximate, able to discuss topics while viewing the body language, facial expressions, and contextual settings of the "other side". Each system can be reduced to a "smaller room" for two people; a variation allows and sometimes emphasizes multi-point meetings, using each of the three two-person screens to represent a new site. Sound-actuation switching can multiplex many such "rooms" -- we've experimented with up to one hundred participants for ten hours in fifteen sites -- a major tour de force.

2. Big TV screen "windows" for multiple-person conferences -- these are seen in LifeSize, Tandberg, Polycom, and Vidyo systems among others. Each can show "another person elsewhere" in High Definition image, or with various "windowed" tiled pictures (think TV Picture in Picture), can show multiple attendees from multiple locales simultaneously.

3. Small Picture Point-to-Point. Think Skype Video, which is essentially a Video Phone ala the famous "failed experiment" of AT&T in 1964 and 1970.

4. Specialty systems -- The Northrup / Applied Minds capability features heavy "war-room" interactive screens for integrated artifact display and spreadsheet and textual presentation plus social networking tools, along with augmented video walls with blurred edges between "rooms" and experimental "auto-director" editing plus archival / retrieval capability.