My post on LibreStream as a funky collaboration tool attracted some interest, not least from Kerry Thacher their CEO… At first I was concerned he’d taken umbrage at my suggestion that my old employers Cisco might take a keen interest in his technology but this fear was very much ungrounded.
To recap and expand, what I had in mind was taking LibreStream’s highly industrial collaboration cameras, making them small funky and consumer and connecting them up via wifi as a fun consumer to consumer app. Now of course these could also function as rather ubiquitous internal communications tools too, maybe more on that later.
What inspired the thought and the Cisco connections was Tandberg and Flip acquisitions, add to that LibreStream and you have something qualitatively more – realtime mobile video collaboration, in ya pocket. Stuff that inspired me ona design side were robust consumer products encased in rubber, stuff like the Nokia 5140, which a friend, The Chiswick Gardener liked to throw over his shoulder to show how robust it was. Take also the Tivoli PAL, fine audioware encased in said too….
So that’s the box, what gets fun is when video gets connected via handhelds using wifi, plus white-boarding. Click shoot share. In live video.
But what happens if you take these new handheld wifi video collaboration phones and take it a step further. How about telepresence too? Sound a bit mad? Well there’s always LifeSize Passport:
LifeSize Passport is the first truly portable telepresence-quality system; Passport is so small, it fits in the palm of your hand….you get true HD video quality – 720p30 – for natural, realistic interactions at only 1Mbps over any internet connection. And LifeSize Passport is the first HD video communication system that works with Skype™, making connecting with colleagues and customers easier than ever.
This would give the ability to project the image outside of the tiny phone – think maybe the hologram scenes in Superman or Star Wars. Almost there…
But what you need next I don’t know if it can be done. For it to really gel, there needs to be some sort of socialising the camera. There needs to be a way of the sender being filmed. So what if these things piggy-backed off of each other so I film someone near as they in tern film me via some sort of reciprocal sharing?
Now we’re talking truly next gen phones…
Update – we’re probably also talking about Foucault’s description of the Panoptican gone mad….