Have you been wondering what all this is about?
There has been a lot of change in terminology in the video conferencing / telepresence business. New technologies were introduced and legacy technology was still kept and is still being developed. In this article, I would like to explain my point of view even though usually every organization uses different terms.
Video Conference
Video Conference (or sometimes written videoconference) is the most common term for video communication. It replaced the term “videotelephony” which was somewhat redundant, even though we will meet the “tele” segment again. A video conference is the form of any communication using image and audio of two or more locations, exchanging data in realtime and in all directions at the same time. Private video conferencing solutions such as Skype also find their home in this category but are not industry standard.
Telepresence
Telepresence is the “new term” for video conferencing. However, most people would agree that the term telepresence includes only highend codecs that support high bandwidth and provide HD resolutions. To be exact even we can break down the term into the two segments “tele” and “presence” so we are talking about being present in a remote location. And even though it is not really related to video conferencing entirely this also include the robotic telepresence or telerobotics.
Immersive Telepresence
If telepresence systems are set up in a concept to provide a high degree of immersion those solutions are called immersive telepresence. The degree of immersion defines how much the users feel like the remote site is actually sitting at the other end of the table in their room even though they might be continents apart. In order to provide this a very complex rule set has to be followed on the design of all participating rooms. If only one of the “illusions” are broken it will not be immersive any longer.
