Will Future Long Distance Meetings Happen in Virtual Worlds, or Technology Like iPhone 4's FaceTime?

After months of anticipation and police seizures, the iPhone 4 has been unveiled. Lots of features to set geek propellors awhirl, most interesting to me being FaceTime, video calling which you see demoed in this video, at about 45 seconds in:

It's actually not the video calling per se that gets me excited, but the use of iPhone's bidirectional cameras, which enables the person on the other end of the line to see you speaking to them -- and then at the push of the button, see what you're seeing. While some are skeptical FaceTime will ever go mass market, the camera-switching feature makes me think it will. It eliminates the awkward discomfort of webcam calls, where you feel forced to continually maintain eye contact with the other person on the call. (Now you can just flip to whatever your camera is looking at.) That also makes it easy to visually share your space with the caller too. These two qualities, as it happens, were also the best two advantages for holding long-distance meetings in virtual worlds like Second Life. Which is one reason why I expect we'll see most future meetings conducted through technology like FaceTime, than avatars. (Then again, "most" is not all, and virtual world meetings will still be useful in situations where 3D graphics is an absolute must.)

Comments

[Crap Mariner]

Hrm... let's see... you could

1) Use a handheld device and click and connect and you've got the meeting running over your phone's camera and microphone and screen

Or

2) Waste hours and days loading software, dorking with settings, fighting with drivers, suffering sporadic service failures, dealing with sudden drops, etc.

For quick one-on-one discussions, this is a no-brainer.

-ls/cm

[LokiLoki]

I really think looking to Second Life for ways to do real world tasks is becoming REALLY pointless and boring.

[Oliver Massenberg]

Would be interesting to see if Apple can succeed where everyone else have failed. Video phone was the huge next thing in Sweden some years ago, as 3G arrived, with heavy advertising and all, but... turned out (again) that while people love to talk to each other, they feel uncomfortable being filmed. While the phones sold good, very few used the feature after the first exciting days. Hell even I have two cameras on my ten year old phone.

I'm not trying to be negative, far from it. Maybe the time has finally come for video phone, but I wouldn't be too certain if I was Mr Jobs. Some changes take more time than we expect. Good luck though!

[Suzanne Aurilio]

Ease of use and mobility seem to be important.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mary_meeker_innovation_is_back.php#more