The volcanic ash shutdown of transatlantic air travel makes me wonder why videoconferencing hasn’t been more popular over the last few years. The typical company still does not have a high quality videoconference capability built into every conference room, which may make sense given that the cost of a 1000′ conference room is about $30,000 per year and high quality hardware/software can be comparable in cost to a year of rent. I’m confused as to why schools that teach foreign languages don’t have a videoconference wall built into every language classroom. A Spanish language class, for example, could have a wall that opens into a classroom in Argentina or Mexico. The cost of a public school teacher in the U.S., including pension and health care obligations, can exceed $200,000 for a 4.5 day workweek over 9 months. The videoconference hardware/software cost would be insignificant compared to the cost of the teacher and one would expect learning to be greatly accelerated if the kids could be bridged to native speakers in a comfortable and natural manner. Even if the American school had to pay for the hardware/software on both ends it would still cost less than paying a teacher to stick around for one summer school.
So how come school trips to Europe have become steadily more popular and videoconference systems in our wired-up schools are uncommon?
I think most people still haven’t witnessed videoconferencing without tons of glitches. It wouldn’t occur to me to try videoconferencing for real work or school given any choice at all – it appears to me to be “not ready for prime time.” It’s certainly possible that expensive systems that ordinary mortals don’t get to see are much better.
Lawrence: Excellent point. I thought that videoconferencing was useless (and I still can’t believe how bad the audio/video quality of Skype in situations where people are both connected to 10-20 Mbit/second Internet service) until I saw a system in Australia connecting conference rooms in two campuses. This was back in 2000, so the technology would certainly be available today at reasonable prices.
The campuses were separated by about 20 miles in Melbourne. One wall of the conference room was a video projector screen opening into the conference room 20 miles away. People in that other room appeared life-size and the audio quality was superb. You could have a normal conversation with a person of normal size, not a “head in a box”.
What would the cost of doing this today be? Maybe $7,000 for a high-res, high-brightness projector (no doubt much better than what I had seen), $1500 for microphones around the room, $5,000 for hardware including video compression/decompression boards to plug into a PC. Throw in another $5,000 for software and you’re at $20,000 per room. The Internet connection is already there and paid for. http://blog.radvision.com/videooverenterprise/2008/06/24/high-definition-is-next-do-you-know-how-much-bandwidth-you-have/ says that you need 3-6 Mbits/second to support 720p and 1080p with H.264 compression.
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?sku=A3221627&cs=04&c=us&l=en&dgc=SS&cid=27722&lid=628335 sells a system for $12,000 that seems to do everything required except display. So $12,000 plus $7,000 and you’re done without having to think.
A friend of mine sent me this story http://bit.ly/c2QXuE that tells how a couple used Skype for celebrating their wedding. They wanted to make it from Australia to London but they couldn’t due to the volcanic ash cloud, they got stuck in Dubai and did the video conference from there with their wedding guests.
I’ve tried the Cisco telepresence solution, which is as you describe (plasmas instead of projectors). I wouldn’t use it again for anything critical. People get on planes for business because it’s easier to determine sincerity and to persuade in person, not because they so enjoy taking off their shoes in public.
If you have a half (or perhaps even a fifth) of a second of latency, that may interfere with conversations occurring in a natural manner. When the videoconferencing rooms are 20 miles apart, the speed of light between the places isn’t going to be nearly so significant as in a transatlantic conversation.
Phil, the systems that you saw back in 2000 are available today; they’re just not remotely “reasonably” priced. 10-15x the prices you quote are typical, and the systems still have glitches, especially when used over stock IP internet lines, without rigid QoS guarantees. If you then add the requirement of MPLS circuits to get acceptable QoS, you’re into pretty big money even in corporate terms, let alone in public school system terms. VideoConf has definitely made modern corporate work easier (less travel required in multi-national companies), but I don’t think by any means that it has gotten as cheap as it ought to be. (To be fair to the Cisco/Tandbergs of the world; getting low latency/low jitter AV performance over a wide area network is a really hard problem, and these problems are all the more glaring when presented at 1080p on 60+” screens.)
Jim: Thanks for the input. I do wonder sometimes if U.S. Internet service customers are getting what they are promised, especially when seeing the ridiculously poor quality of Skype when there is theoretically 10 Mbps of end-to-end bandwidth. I wonder if things are better in countries that have fatter pipes (Japan, Korea?).
Joel: Good point on the latency. If I were a kid in Spanish class, though, I’d still rather talk to a same-age kid in Mexico than to a civil servant waiting to collect her pension.
John: I don’t think that a plasma TV is large enough. The life-sized projection made a huge difference for me. It also meant that it was sort of hard to sit around a conference table, but perhaps business meetings should be held standing up anyway. They’d be less likely to drag on until peoples’ bladders exploded and/or the Aeron chairs collapsed from the accumulated obesity.
My nephew bought a 1080p Epson projector for maybe $5k – it has to be used in a darkened room, but projected on his specially painted basement wall it shows NFL players from head to toe as basically full size. Surely dimming the lights and dropping $10K total on comfy chairs (plus the cost of the projector and camera) would work for most people?
The breakthrough will come when we have a heads-up 3D display that will let you interact with the local and remote site simultaneously. This requires some technical problems to be resolved (you can pre-scan figures, rooms, objects, etc. prior to the meeting) so all that you need to send is object location, movements and voice. In doing so, you should be able to interact and walk around figures and objects (not necessarily touch or feel, that will take StarTrek holodeck) in a meeting hall / room. Sadly, I think the porn industry will lead here before it becomes a reality.
No one wil argue that this disaster is going to cost a lot more to everyone than what a video conferencing system would cost them. And especially with educational institutions that can get grants from the government! Some schools have got one of our LifeSize Room systems, our highest end solution before the jump to the 3 screened LifeSize Conference, for about a hundred bucks! That’s even cheaper than a plane ticket!
As for your question about the low jump to VC, I think there’s just a general hesitancy around changing old institutions that have worked for a long time. Again and again throughout history, we’ve seen that it takes BIG disasters to wake people up. Hopefully that will happen!
This is a great blog about video conferencing in education, by the way: http://vcoutonalim.org/
Check out our website too and let me know what you think!
Thanks, Sarah
I’ll have my 2 cents on this one.
Lower real bandwith to a big audience and chinese companies will copy cat Tandberg’s and do the rest.
The problem is not in hardware, when bandwith becomes real (i.e. not a 10% guaranteed of whatever commercial name they are selling bandwith under (4Mbps, 8Mbps, etc) and payable Chinese companies will fill the need for full size images of grandma (of grandsons, rather, since grandma is expected to be able to pay for both sides of the equipment).
Phil’s initial posting assumes that the purpose of travel for students is only to learn a language. Let me not quibble but assume that is the case—a person just wants to pick up the lingo.
My personal experience may not be typical, but I always learn languages better in the realistic situation, with its confusion, embarrassment, sights, smells and immediate needs. In 2008, I had not traveled in some years when I boarded All Nippon Airways flight 001, IAD to NRT. I was alone, but would meet a friend at Tokyo/Narita. I had a little prior background on pronunciation etc, but set to work on some phrase-book Japanese. So, I only know a few phrases or nouns, but I drilled to say them correctly . misu = water; ringo jusu = apple juice; buraku kafe = black coffee, kudasai = please. There are other polite phrases, but kudasai is the simple term used by the ANA flight attendants themselves. That’s a small vocabulary, but I must have spoken clearly enough, the nice ladies gave me what I asked for. I could taste the ringo jusu.
In 1964, I irritated a German fellow by turning on a light early in the morning. Speaking to another German actually, he said “Hast du das grosse Licht angemacht?” Did you turn on the big light? I was astounded that this rather uneducated person, half asleep, spoke in perfect grammar. That short sentence is thick with grammar rules. I remember his irritation, my remorse, and his words. I had no classroom training in German, but a willingness to study.
I would love to sit in on your video-conference Spanish lesson and make the most of it. I would still need other kinds of experience to make the phrases real and unforgettable.