From: "Billy Brown" <bbrown@conemsco.com>
>That I can understand. But how often would you use it for normal
>phone calls?
>I'm not saying such things won't exist. I just don't they they
>will be widely adopted in the consumer market until very
>sophisticated image filtering methods are available.
>BTW, this isn't just my personal opinion. The telephone companies
>ran into this issue back in the 80s when they were experimenting
>with analog videophones, and it is one of the things that
>convinced them to drop the idea. They kept getting complaints
>from users who didn't want to be seen by everyone they talked to,
>and turning off the display just made everyone wonder what you
>were hiding. At the time they couldn't come up with a good >
>solution to the problem.
DISCLAIMER: I do not speak for Ameritech or it's alliance partners. My opinion's are my own.
Actually TPC has been experimenting with this since the 60's, I was one of the last group of tech's to service the original equipment at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry when it was running there, and recently have restored some of this equipment for our archives folk.
The problem has always been bandwidth, plus the large amount of equipment and service required. If the equipment/bandwidth was cheap and reliable, everyone would have one of these.(IMMHO)
I could see many people doing the PeeWee Herman dress-up version of this, not to mention adult calls/wrong numbers as in "Demolition Man".
I had one of these sitting on my desk for a month running a continual link between myself and the archives folks, it was a blast.... with it's weird art deco housing, I felt like I was in the flick "2001 A Space Odyssey".
Brian
Member, Extropy Institute
www.extropy.org
Member, Life Extension Foundation
www.lef.org