Garden-variety reasons desktop video conferencing is inferior
Admittedly, I’m still a bit of a snob when it comes to persistent, text-based, group chat. Text is still the most functional. And since I haven’t ranted on it in a while …
- My usual gripes are that you can’t conference with as many people as you can on telephone, or especially on group chat. So, for group collaboration it’s inferior. Group text chat, in particular, has the advantage of not allowing for “blocking effects” that you can get on video, phone or even in person.
- It doesn’t capture, in a machine searchable way, the contents of a meeting. So, you have to have a scribe/minute-taker. So, it’s inferior and more expensive than group chat, news groups and email.
- And ok, yeah, so you can see the other person, and gauge their body language and other non-verbal cues. If the video is of sufficient resolution and frame-rate. And yes, research shows that during in-person conversations most communications are non-verbal anyway. I’ve seen the research and I’ll buy it. BUT…. what’s the fidelity of that non-verbal comms? It would be interesting to see a study done on how much non-verbal communications actually gets transmitted faithfully over a video conference link. There’s got to be some threshold (frame rate, resolution) at which non-verbal cue quality drops off.
For example …. If video quality is 18 frames per second, resolution is VGA or worse, and the other person’s face is poorly lit and taking up only 1/4-1/3 of the frame – are you even capturing all the sidelong glances and other expressions that we think we’re getting?
Cheers,
Eric
I think there is a level of conversation where text chat starts to become too slow. Have you ever come to the realisation that you have been typing about an issue for the last 20 minutes, when you could have just picked up the phone and solved the problem in 5 minutes?
I guess I look at the value-add for desktop video over desktop audio (e.g. a telephone). I’m with you on the fidelity issue though.
Have you seen Cisco’s Telepresence product? With 3x HD screens it’s easy to tell when the guy up the back is scratching his nose. (So watch out if that guy is you!)