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, Read more...

Mirial announces ClearSea supports H.264 also on mobile devices, leveraging on the hardware-based decoding capabilities of the mobile CPU.

The support in ClearSea for H.264 up to qHD is available on most Tegra2-based devices and Qualcomm-based devices, such as HTC Sensation, the Motorola Atrix 4G, the Dell Streak 7 and many others, with qHD (960x540 pixels) being the native resolution of the most advanced smartphones available today. The majority of Android devices can still enjoy H.264 high quality video codec up to CIF resolution in ClearSea. Read more...

From Digital Video Enterprises (DVE), the people that brought you the Immersion Room, now comes the DVE Immersive Podium. Unlike traditional videoconferencing , the borders of the screen disappear and people appear holographically.

The podium was unveiled live to packed audiences at Infocomm 2010. DVE demonstrated live HD holographic telepresence images of people transmitted live from their office in Irvine, California and combined with 3-D animation.

DVE patented an Augmented Reality effect to bring ultra-realistic images from a virtual world Read more...

Calling it “the industry’s first affordable 1080p at 60fps solution supporting up to 20 screens at 10% the cost of current telepresence solutions,” Vidyo announces VidyoPanorama.

VidyoPanorama offers an average price of around $6000 per screen for a 9 screen system and $4,500 per screen for a 20 screen system. Both the 720p60 and the 1080p60 solutions will be in Beta trials with customers and partners in August 2011 and will be generally available in Q4 2011.

“Traditional telepresence systems promised an ‘in-person’ experience when optimised in set Read more...