THE FUTURE AS SEEN THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

The worst thing about videoconferencing? It's not just like being there. So a team of researchers at McGill University in Montreal have received $1 million from a few sources (including CANARIE, Canada's Internet research organization, Cisco Systems and Panasonic) to create the next step in videoconferencing, which they call “ultravideoconferencing” — a step closer to being there.

The McGill team will use three adjacent 65-inch plasma screen TVs in Montreal and three uncompressed channels of high-definition television to meet with a group using an identical set-up on the other side of the continent in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Unlike traditional videoconferencing, this system will display users in life-size, and with the resolution afforded by HDTV, if someone in Montreal holds up an impromptu diagram scribbled on a napkin, the team in Vancouver will be able to read it. In addition, though the system has centralized microphones, up to two users in each location will be able to hold private sidebar conversations with individuals on the other side by donning headsets (and presumably moving to the outer screens).

“It's more like you're looking through a window,” said John Roston, the project's coordinator and the university's director of instructional multimedia services.

It's not a mass-market application, of course. The kind of TVs the researchers are using sell for about $17,000 each. And the system requires a corpulent 3.5 Gb/s of bandwidth to each endpoint, which few firms have. But big bandwidth is a deliberate aspect of the team's approach.

“Everybody talks about how little bandwidth [they] can use and still see people at the far end,” Roston said. “We're looking further down the road. We think bandwidth is going to be cheap, and there's going to be lots of it available.”

Roston doesn't expect ultravideoconferencing to take off next year, nor does he expect it to ever completely obviate business travel, but for top executives whose time is too valuable to spend chewing peanuts on planes, ultravideoconferencing could be a smart choice in a world where bandwidth is cheap and time is money.

Latency is a major obstacle to the feeling of “being there,” as Roston found in a previous project, which achieved 50 millisecond latency over an IP network by settling for lower- quality video. He expects between 100 millisecond and 120 millisecond of latency in the current project, which he hopes the team will cut down to 80 millisecond or so by fine-tuning their software. One of the principle challenges for Roston's team will be the proper synchronization of the three different HDTV signals. Another will be the problem of how the viewing fields of the three screens overlap each other on the other end of the room.

“Someone who stands in just the right spot would appear on two screens at the same time,” Roston said.

He expects to be able to demonstrate the new system with one TV screen in June and the full three screens by the end of the year. If all goes well, he will seem to be in Vancouver at the time.