David Danto knows telepresence! And videoconferencing! And visual collaboration! David is the Director of Emerging Technologies at the IMCCA, he is the Principal Consultant for Collaboration, AV, Multimedia, Video and UC for the $5 billion+ systems integration powerhouse: Dimension Data. Prior to Dimension Data, David was Vice President and Director of Video and Telepresence Engineering at JP Morgan Chase where he built the world’s largest commercial Cisco TelePresence ecosystem. In an April 15th article entitled: “Danto’s Top 10 Disrupters – April 2014”, David list Array Telepresence as #2.
Here is what David had to say about Array:
Magic, Invisible Cameras in Videoconference Rooms: A Startup has managed to place tiny cameras in the bezel between two flat panels. Array Telepresence is a new firm being run by industry old-timers Herold Williams and Howard Lichtman. They are debuting a technology that places tiny cameras in a piece between two flat panel displays, and processes the images in a “black box” that connects to a videoconference codec. They are able to stitch-together life-size, “immersive telepresence type” images on a standard codec of almost any brand. Not sure if this firm will be a success (considering the poor choice of a name – “Invisible Camera” might have been better) but this is clearly the first productized version of this often speculated technology – where images from a series of pinhole cameras are stitched together using processing. In future iterations of this kind of system you can imagine a floor to ceiling image on the collaboration wall of a room, where participants would be able to work with distant peers as if each are on the other side of a piece of write-on glass. Good to see this finally (almost) make it to the market.
You can get David’s full report by joining his mailing list (Highly Recommended) by dropping him an e-mail at: [email protected]