Group video communications suffers an inherent problem: in a movie, if there’s a group, the director turns the camera so you know which person is speaking and the video follows the action.
Well, video conferencing is not Hollywood and corporate communications can’t bear the cameraman’s salary let alone a director’s fee. So we have all suffered.
Now Polycom wants to end that by enabling close-up views of every speaker in a video conference (regardless of their location or the number of people in the room) with automated and “directed” camera pan, tilt and zoom.
This delivers an affordable, personalized telepresence experience in group meetings by intelligently emulating professional video production techniques without remote control or user intervention required.
The technology automatically locates active speakers and through simultaneous voice triangulation and face-finding accurately crops their image on to the display.
And it eliminates disruptive manual remote control errors by automatically zooming in on the person who is speaking – without historic camera tracking limitations like fixed camera presets or wearing unnatural IR transmitters.
The system for corporate and educational uses is about $10,000 for two 1080 HD cameras and the tracking system.
