Wandering about the net I stumbled upon this web page at Sony's Website for their Broadcast and Professional Research Lab where someone has developed the following vision, objectives, and technology interests:

"Our vision is to develop a high-realism telepresence conferencing system that will replace the need to travel for many types of business meetings. You will be able to communicate as effectively as if your colleagues are sitting next to you in the same room and in fact you are led to believe that they are present in the same room."

Objectives

* To develop the innovative technology necessary to produce a convincing impression of presence in a semi-immersive teleconferencing system
* To integrate and demonstrate a telepresence system incorporating such innovative techniques
* To investigate the human factors involved in maximising the effectiveness and realism of telepresence, and to use them to drive the design of the system

Technology

* Head Tracking: Locate viewer position to control the rendering of the remote participants on the 2D screen to support motion parallax
* Calibration and Rectification: Create new images with lens distortion removed and compute new virtual image planes with geometrical consistency
* Segmentation & Tracking: Removal of the participant and moving objects such as arms from a arbitrary background
* Disparity Map Calculation: Calculate correspondence between camera views for each pixel
* View Rendering: Create custom views of participants from the camera and disparity data
* Virtual World: Real-time rendering of synthetic elements such as the conference table
* Encoding: Compression of video, audio and ancillary data (disparity data) according to bandwidth constraints.
* Network Interface: Low latency IP based
* Document Sharing: Support for virtual whiteboard and sharing of hardcopy documents

Telepresence
A communication system is said to have a higher degree of telepresence the more it gives the distributed participants the feeling of sharing space with their remote partners, or (within the framework of videoconferencing) at least the feeling of sitting at a shared table in the same virtual room.

While the Sony BP Lab's website is unfortunately devoid of any further details it does appear that someone at Sony at least understands some of the core concepts and they appear to be kicking the tires in the lab. The fact that Sony has deep intellectual property and manufacturing expertise in so many of the core componets of Telepresence systems including: Cameras, Codecs, Display (Both flat-screen and projection), and microphones/speakers to name but a few, would suggest that they could be an eventual player.

If anyone has any additional information on Sony's research or intentions please e-mail me @ HSL@HumanProductivityLab(dot)com