When I think of “the future”, as it was imagined when I was a kid, everybody had flying cars and talked on video phones, where you could easily see the person you were talking to. I understand why we don’t have flying cars, but what happened to the video phone?
The technology is available (i.e. video conferencing at the business level). Why don’t people have wall units in their house, video screens in the car, and on video connections on their cell phones.
Any ideas on why the technology never caught on?
Is it really as simple as because people prefer being able to lie on the phone about what they are doing, where they’re at, or what they are wearing?
It is just simple human psychology. Most people don’t want to be contacted by camera whenever someone else dictates it and refusing the request is uncomfortable from a social perspective. All people have private lives and things they don’t want anyone else to see on demand. As you noted, video conferencing is very cheap to the point of being almost free for willing parties but it never caught on. All technological achievements still depend on the fact that people actually want to use that feature. The failure rate of that type of prediction is notoriously poor from a human perspective. Google succeeds because it strives to follow human psychology.
There was a similar thread recently. Like you say the technology is there, and there are people who regularly use video calling from their cell phones, not to mention the many people who use Skype and similar programs, but it doesn’t seem to be something people feel comfortable just doing. Whenever I want to video call with someone on Skype we normally arrange a time to do it, and it’s only with close family.
The phone network is the result of 100+ years of fine-tuning a system for transmission of voice and it is massively standardized - but it took decades to reach that level of maturity. You can purchase a phone, plug it in, and it Just Works. When it breaks, buy another one, repeat. No firmware, version issues or codecs.
Video transmission in real-time takes considerably more bandwidth than a simple voice call - and it is as sensitive to jitter and latency as a voice call. Phone companies gave it a sporting try with ISDN - the two B-channels provided 128 Kbps, guaranteed end-to-end, and that could provide a reasonable video image. It was also bloody expensive, and no-one came up with a standardized video phone in the limited time ISDN had center stage. Sure Polycom and others made decent setups, but if the call recipient didn’t have a Polycom, you were SOL. Perhaps a standard could have been developed in time but… Right on the heels of ISDN came cheap broadband Internet access in the form of widespread ADSL and cable - and people decided that dedicated low bandwidth at high price was a bum deal compared to cheap shared high bandwidth.
So now we have the Internet as the only realistic delivery vehicle for video telephony - and it’s not that great for the purpose. There’s no way to reserve bandwidth end-to-end, and IP is per definition a best-effort protocol.
So, with a slightly lacking communication infrastructure, no one has been able to come up with an Internet-based video phone app that blows everybody’s socks off - and without that, there’s nobody pushing for standardization.
Corporate networks can of course prioritize and reserve bandwidth for video - we do - but we always end up having better things to do with the bandwidth than provide person-to-person video calls.
Business videoconferencing technology would be overkill. You can do reasonable videophoning over Skype; if both parties have broadband, they can do it for free (except for the equipment). Yeah, it’s a bit slow, but that’s a general internet bandwidth problem. I expect that bandwidth will improve over time.
Nevertheless, I don’t expect to see videophones any time soon. What for? The telephone is a device for communicating with people, not looking at them. I can’t see much need for the video part of a video phone signal, and I do video conferences all the time! The people in NYC look at me, I look at them.
It’s embarassing, actually; with a regular phone they could do anything they wanted to as long as it was silent. With a videophone they have to look like they’re paying attention. Think about what you do when you sit talking on the phone. Do you want to show people that? Do they need to see it?
Nothing in this world progresses either exponentially or even at a constant rate. Sooner or later we settle into technology that works “good enough”, and not much can move us away from it.
Flying cars might come about if someone could invent a good one, and we then discovered that commuting was really fast since we didn’t need to use a road. It still might happen, but it may be better for us to figure out ways of reducing emissions before we speed up travel.
My question is: “It’s 2008 already. What happened to the computer that could think, talk to me, and understand what I say?” Heck, I’d take that, even if it did act paranoid and try to kill me from time to time…
eh not really. Pretty much every phone I’ve ever seen here in Japan has the ability, but I’ve never actually seen anyone using it, and I myself have only ever used it once. There’s just really not much of a point to it. To be honest, even though I have the ability to call someone and use voice communication, I’d just as soon text message them. I use video calling (Skype, specifically) when I call my parents because they like that sort of thing, but video phones just aren’t as snazzy as one might think. Plus it’s more comfortable to talk to someone with a phone in your ear, rather than hold it out in front of you, and you don’t feel like you’re required to keep eye contact on a tiny screen, you can multitask.
you just hold it in front of you, basically. Most cell phone cameras have a “self view” option so you can take a picture of yourself while looking at the screen to see what the picture will be. The same camera is used in video calls, so you have to hold the phone the same way. The audio plays over speaker phone and the mic is usually strong enough to capture your voice if you speak at a normal volume. It’s just not practical, though.
But yea, the video quality isn’t anything amazing, and is usually a bit jerky. Not too bad, though.
I vid chat with my friends and clients ALL the time over iChat. My best friend and me will sometimes just keep it running for several hours at a time, if we’re both working on something. It feels like we’re in the same room, and keeps us both company. And with my clients, it’s my favorite way to talk business, as a lot can be communicated in what I do through hand gestures and body language. It’s also a great way to stay in tough with long distance friends and family.
On the flip side, it is far more intrusive than the telephone. You might not be presentable, or you just don’t care for that level of invasion in your day. Refusing to vid can feel a little odd sometimes, and forces you to come up with an excuse that makes both parties feel comfortable. A lot of people sometimes tell white lies to get off the phone, or if on a cell, don’t want the person on the other end to see where they are just by looking. Who want’s that level of peering eyes in their lives? Yet, if you really want it, it’s readily available with a web-cam and high-speed internet. Go for it.
The first videophones were tried out as long ago as 1968. Ma Bell installed a number of them in some Chicago-area businesses. They used analog video which I understand they transmitted over a twisted pair cable. The few pictures I’ve seen of this always show the people on the videophone looking downward. In those days, video cameras were nowhere near as compact as today, and the lens must have been significantly above the screen.
At any rate, people quickly realized that this was a luxury they didn’t need.
I’ve always figured that the single biggest deterrent to the flying car was the potential hazards of putting your average person in charge of a lethal weapon traveling in 3 dimensions. Can you imagine a fender bender at 5,000 feet?
The marginal improvement(if any) in user experience is probably not worth the bandwidth and cost to most users. I dont want acquaintances to see me at home, in my ragged clothes.
We do have some videoconferences at work, and I loathe them. Seeing some nutty guy waving his arms is distracting, I would prefer to listen to the content of the message.
Ummmm. The thing with videophones is that “the first” ones actually have come along about every decade or so, each one a clumsy attempt to make people forget the last.
The first one I know about was in 1929. It consisted of two phone booths (and *only *two) equipped with television. At the time TV was a lo-res affair requiring horrendous quantities of light. When you placed your call, it bathed the people at both ends in about 900 watts of arc lamp. This allowed the system to see them but prevented them from seeing each other (or pretty much anything else until the lights went out). Making the light blue helped, but not much.
I can see both sides of this. When my boss calls me I can be playing with my pizzle while he digresses all over the place so my time is not completely wasted. On the other hand the guy can’t concentrate worth shit so he’ll call me to ask me something and he thinks he can be doing something else at the same time so he ends up totally lost and I have to repeat everything I said. If we were looking at each other then he would be paying attention to me and what I was saying.
I’ll second everyone who said we don’t have them because we don’t want them but I’ll add a caveat: I predict that, even though most don’t want to use them, there will be a market for video phones and the motive force will be porn.
My mom calls me at 6:00am every Saturday morning to ask me if I want to go to breakfast at IHOP at 8:00am. While I’m glad she gives me two hours to wake up and get ready for breakfast, I don’t want her seeing me with wild hair and a dumb look on my face. That’ll just open the door for more questions I don’t want to answer!