What does the future of telepresence look like?

What does the future of telepresence look like? Some see immersive telepresence rooms that make users feel like they are all sitting down in one big conference room, while others see home offices with HD screens connecting remote workers to their corporate office far away. No Jitter brings up some important points in one of its latest columns stating that most room-size systems are truly only for upper management and that its the low-cost personal video conferencing systems that will essentially democratize telepresence.

This week, Lifesize and LG teamed up to offer another step towards personal telepresence systems. They are combining Lifesize's video communication solutions with an HD LG television in an offering that at first blush one might think is aimed at the consumer market. Truly this new product isn't really for the family room, but for the home office. Inexpensive when compared to the more extensive room sized telepresence systems out there, the Lifesize/LG solution--similar to Polycom's HDX 4000 personal telepresence series, Skype's partnership with LG and Panasonic and the Cisco STB offering--represents a realization of one of the promises of video conferencing marketing materials. Work from anywhere while seeming like you are right there in the office.

As HD screens become more inexpensive and video processing technology adapts to improve quality of service over broadband connections, mobile workers will be able to take advantage of that almost there feeling that telepresence has promised to deliver. With price points within reach for smaller businesses, the idea that telepresence is just for multi-national corporations or just upper management will soon be a thing of the past.

They main challenge still in the way--but currently being tackled from a couple places--in interoperability. Video solutions have long been woefully proprietary in their interoperability but with the recent launch of UCIF and Cisco's TIP, the industry it doing its best to join together to test their products together and adopt standards that everyone can work with. As telepresence moves away from the board room and into the home office, there will be many more nodes that need connecting and many more devices to interoperate with. Getting the standards right prior to this home-based telepresence revolution will be the only way the idea has a chance to be a ubiquitous technology.

This week I've put together some of the recent news stories that relate to this idea of personal telepresence. Check out the news round up here and let us know what you think about the trend. Does it have legs or is telepresence doomed to remain locked in just one room in the company? - Mike