Toonconferencing

[mithriltabby]

By the time videoconferencing becomes popular, it will probably take place over fiber optic lines and not be much constrained by bandwidth. There will be some demand for it over wireless, though, and that is much more constrained. Wireless videophones will have to have some way to downgrade their connections to handle limited bandwidth. Right now, we just wind up with dropped frames and jerky movements, but throwing more processing at it could make things much more interesting.

When CPU horsepower drastically outstrips available bandwidth, there will be a lot of ways to compress connections. I expect one of them will be optimized for the most important data in video communication: the nuances of the human face. We’ve already spent decades working on a very low-bandwidth representation of that, in the form of cartoons. Once there’s demand for low-bandwidth video connections, I expect we’ll see “toon filters” that operate by identifying the important details of the human face and transmitting just the changes in those parameters over the wire (after an initial setup).

And once you can send a cartoon of your own face, it should be possible to send any other cartoon you want. Disney may even license their trademark characters so people can make calls as anyone from the Cheshire Cat to Maleficent. (Though that may get nixed as soon as someone brings up the possibility of getting an obscene phone call from the Little Mermaid.) More exaggerated cartoony features may even be easier to read on small screens than normal human proportions.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

This should go the way of the picture phones of yore, i.e. nowhere.

Teleconferencing is a lousy substitute for in-person interaction at the best of times; do you seriously think cartoons would have any use other than occasional amusement value?

And there is no such thing as unconstrained bandwidth. As soon as any form of computing expands its power, Microsoft will write new software to use that additional power up. This is their actual business plan to keep selling products; I've read an interview with Gates in which he explains this.

[mithriltabby]

I suspect that improvements in videoconferencing will be driven by globally distributed businesses and telecommuters— particularly if we get a pandemic at some point that creates strong selection pressure for telecommuters— and the technology will spread to private usage from there. It’s not as good as being there, but it’s less bad than a voice-only connection, and should be better when it becomes financially practical to have a big screen that makes conferencing like talking through a life-size window. The underlying technology for face mapping will also likely see use in MMORPGs.

Fiber optic bandwidth won’t be unlimited, but the capacity should be enough to support real time video links.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

We have monthly video conferences with our counterparts in Dresden. They're scheduled for 8 a.m. our time / 5 p.m. their time. They're very useful.

[mdlbear]

Sounds a lot like MPEG 4 (I think that's the object-oriented one). Most interaction of that sort is going to take place in virtual venues like Second Life, which are converging on the kind of compression you describe, but from the opposite direction.