How would you like to have wireless videoconferencing all in the palm of your hand so you can conference with coworkers or just one individual? It might be a lot closer than you think to have videoconferencing with multiple individuals there’s a patent that went to publication recently it has not been issued is just been published the patent number is 20060114987 you can look that up at the patent office uspto.gov and the inventors named is Kendall Roman.
Eessentially what Kendall is showing is an iPod enhanced so that you can have videoconferencing over it. Of course there is a video display, speakers, or headphones and a microphone. And this is a live transmission not prerecorded video so you can actually stream video to the other members in the videoconference. In particular they talk about an embodiment of a video camera that can be removable or mounted on an iPod type device. In other words you would take your current iPod or iPod type device ad on their video camera it might even include a microphone or speakers and the wireless communications so that your rope and ready to go.
Now what’s interesting is it’s not just the fact that there’s a video camera this deals with video streaming and the compression of the video streaming and the sampling rates of the video frames so that they can all happen in real time to be able to compress or decompress the data.
What is interesting is how this will be used it might be tough if you’re walking down the street to hold the iPod type device that it focuses on your face and everyone else in the conference. It would be weird if you were the one in the office and five other individuals were using this wireless videoconferencing device walking down the street and the headshot of them is bouncing up and down as they talk and you’re looking at their shoulders than their head than their hair than their feet shoulders head and hair back and forth back and forth.
However, it would be very convenient to have this device but since laptops are so small these days typically have built-in cameras tilting speakers and built-in microphones. I’m not sure what the real application is here other than it’s very light weight also this is not unlike any other videoconference device and could be applied to any mobile phone.
Either way the idea of video telephone calls is happening all the time when there be a video telephone device or just using an application such as iChat or Skype or an application and online meeting software. Maybe you’ll have to hook this device onto a headset that holds the camera a foot from your head in focuses on your face so that it doesn’t bounce.
It will be very interesting to see if this inventor actually obtains a patent for this device and it may be that he only receives certain claims and cannot claim the whole device. However it is good to see the people value videoconferencing more and more and particularly want to put it in the palm of your hand.
