INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVES

On Visual Conferencing And VoIP Convergence

Immersive Conferencing – Integrated Voice, Video & Data

"Unified communications solutions have the potential to significantly alter and improve the way individuals, groups and companies interact and perform. The convergence of voice, Web and videoconferencing and collaboration represents a key building block for delivering a complete solution, contributing to better integration of communications channels and business processes."

As the enterprise migrates to a converged and single IP communications infrastructure, demand for visual communications has increased sharply both at the desktop and in the conference room. Recent market research shows that video and hybrid meetings – combination of video, voice and application sharing – have doubled in the past 3 years and are accelerating as the corporate infrastructure converts to VoIP.

Current visual solutions on the market fall well short of users’ demands that they be inexpensive, intuitive to use, and tightly coupled to collaborative applications.

Those demands suggest that today’s conference room appliances – the speakerphone, the videoconferencing system and the data hub – will not survive as stand-alone devices and are difficult to integrate. This is because they are neither VoIP-compatible nor integrated in the fashion that users demand of next-generation convergence tools, and they leave the organization in an incomplete state for full VoIP conversion.

Seeing is Believing – The Role of Visual Perception

"The main benefits of videoconferencing, according to current users, are that it cuts costs and saves time, particularly in global applications. But what are the wider business benefits? Ever since Gerard Nierenberg and Henry Calero's How to Read a Person Like a Book (1971) and Desmond Morris's Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour (1977), the study of body language has become a subject of great academic and popular interest. Yet what is not so well known is how Charles Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) revealed that the same facial expressions are common to human beings all over the world. In a riposte to the racists of his day, Darwin affirmed humanity's common descent and what he called "the unity of mankind". It is this universal aspect of human facial expression that explains some of the global benefits of videoconferencing."

"There are considerable differences between face-to-face communication and phone, email and other verbal communication. At most, only seven per cent of our interpretation of communication is based on actual words. Without other cues, the "real" message can often be misinterpreted. An important part of face-to-face communication comes from the "non-verbal’" aspects including facial expression, gestures, body language, our dress and our appearance. Communicating by phone realizes some of the benefits of face-to-face communication by way of voice tone, volume and pauses, but we lose the visuals that convey a full 55 per cent of the message."

"When a person knows that his facial expressions are not available to his listener, he still does not stop using them or automatically start to compensate for their absence by using other behaviors. In one of our studies, we asked the subjects to produce sarcastic messages that were to be audio recorded. Many subjects who tried to say something sarcastically consistently relied on their facial expressions; when we listened to the recordings from these subjects, we found them totally lacking in sarcasm. Even when this was pointed out, however, these persons still were unable to produce a sarcastic expression vocally – they continued to use their facial expressions."

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Less Travel – More Collaboration

"Nearly three-quarters (71%) of all business air travelers in 2004 felt that the use of teleconferencing, webcasting or videoconferencing was somewhat or much more efficient than travel, up from 65 percent in 2002."

"The fact is that face-to-face meetings are vital to the success of all business relationships and work-related projects. However, collaborating in today's fast-paced, ever-connected world demands that we be at all places at once. The only way to maintain this level of communication without ringing up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel costs and losing hundreds of valuable hours in productivity every year is by utilizing incorporating conferencing technologies into the mix."

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