Sunday, October 22, 2006

RoundTable

RoundTable is the name for a new conferencing camera from Microsoft. This was discussed during a recent Live Communications Server Train the Trainer class in London. The basic idea is that this camera sits on a  (round) table in a conference room, getting a 360 degree view of the room. It then displays pictures of the participants in a band at the bottom of a Live  Meeting window. The cool part is that RoundTable works out who the speaker is (i.e. the person with the loudest voice) and presents them in a separate part of the screen.

This is pretty neat technology due to be sold for around US$3000, according to a Microsoft PressPass interview with Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group. In the interview, Pall describes the device and how development is going. As I understand it, this device will be supported in the next version of LCS.

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