In my living room? In my hand? On my desk? I've got a smart display sitting there which can do video calls, which is basically a video phone, and my smartphone and laptop have a variety of ways to do video calls. I can even attach a webcam to my streaming media box on my HDTV and do a zoom call.
The title should have been, "We're living in the future!"
There's no interoperability between services. We really don't have a video calling standard or anything. It's great that you can use 50 proprietary services, but have you ever called anybody without asking "Do you use Zoom/FaceTime/Teams, etc?" No, you have to get in touch with them before hand and arrange the video call or install some client application. You can't just give someone a number and make a video call like you can with a traditional phone. Nobody ever asks me who my cell phone carrier is to make sure we can make a phone call.
They are here. Our family is constantly video-calling with friends and family on our phones using apps like Marco Polo. They nailed the asynchronous video-walkie-talkie experience really well. We stay in touch far more with it now because it's often easier and more expressive than just text and doesn't have the synchronous "blocking" nature of a phone call.
I can't help but notice that all of the historical concept art shows people sitting in one place while being fully-clothed and presentable. But phones have never been used that way at home. Even before wireless phones, people would buy extra-long cords for their phone handset so they could (for example) walk around in the kitchen preparing food while talking. And because phone calls are synchronous and intrusive, it's easy (and was historically common) to receive phone calls when you're not ready for video. I suspect that those two factors were at least as important as the high price in dooming any attempt at home video phones.
There's more of a case for long-distance video calls, but even long-distance voice calling was so expensive in the pre-cell phone era that it was rarely used for personal calls. Even the video calling we do today looks more like business -- scheduled conference calls -- than the personal phone calls of old.
As a matter of fact this is exactly what came out from an experiment made in Europe (Biarritz/France), in the '80's and '90's (the price was not an issue as the experiment was subsidized).
People had troubles in finding a place to put the device (most put it in a "neutral" area, like a corridor), and there was the "etiquette" issue of allowing video or not (because of not being "ready" for the video call).
Facebook made Portal, the video chat device that follows you around. The only problem was it was made by Facebook. If almost any other company made that I would’ve bought it. The wrist fatigue from FaceTime can get pretty bad. Constantly worrying about being in the frame does too.
The historical thought was that videophones would be these discrete electronic devices and instead they kept shrinking and getting cheaper until now where it only costs a few more dollars to add a camera and a microphone to any electronic device.
I always associate the videophone concept with Max Headroom, where the president of ZikZak Corporation used one to glower at his underlings, Big Brother style, from an enormous screen on one wall. Son of a gun, today's corporate meeting rooms have video conferencing setups, replete with a huge screen on one wall, so that use case (there were others in the show) appears to have been bang on the money.
If you're going to argue that we don't really have picturephones, just computers that do video and audio over the network, you should argue we don't really have a telephone network anymore, just a computer network that routes audio, video, and other things. The backhaul for my parents' "landline" is 5G.
Film director Wim Wenders's "Until the end of the world" from 1991 shows a very interesting future with "video fax" and "video phones". And instead of CD's it shows credit-card-form audio storage. The way this film depicts how video phones might work was actually convincing. Still, right now when someone tries to FaceTime me, I decline...
> The phone company started working on video calling when it sent a speech by Herbert Hoover — then the Secretary of Commerce — from Washington to New York in 1927. The video was only one way and with a limited frame rate.
This not a phone call. This is cable television.
> The reality is, we don’t have true picture phones. We have computers with sufficient bandwidth to carry live video and audio. Your FaceTime call is going over the data network.
So, the former is a video phone, despite being one way, but the latter is not a video phone because it was sent over a "data network."
POTS is a "data network". Hence the ability to transmit faxes, or use TCP/IP with it.
* pinches fingers * As an Italian, this is not accurate. * waves hands *
I really struggle on meetings when video is off. I have a harder time reading the audience/individual and also expressing myself. There's a lot that is communicated visually.
I have one in my kitchen. Google decided it needs to use Allo, or Duo, or who knows what for it to work so it never gets used. We have a Facebook thing in the living room that I keep unplugged 24x7 for christmas and big events that family use for video chats. Every phone made has facetime or a selfie cam. The problem is there isn't one catch all protocol which frustrates me.
I see a surprising number of people wandering around downtown or through a department store with their phone held out in front of them for a video call. Not even "I'm showing you the options for that thing you wanted", just "give me company while I make a Target run". Bizarre.
We all have videophones on our Apple iPhone/iPad/iWatch and macOS laptops and use Signal app with our Android cellphone friends.
My entire extended family use videophone everyday for the past 12 years. (We are a Deaf-related family). Heck, we can even sign to a FCC-certified operator and they'll translate into spoken words to just about ANYBODY (include the dreaded navigation of press-5-for-somewhere-in-the-IT-dept and voicemail hell) and do the reverse in turn ... many times a day.
The good part? During grocery shopping (you detest that, don't you, but you detest the rant-n-raving of the wrong selection more) and unsure of which can of chile con carne, chile w/o beans, chile with beans, chile beans, chile beans with meat or something to get, videophone your spouse and show the shelf racks.
Best for watching baby's first-step, graduation, first bicyling, "Look, Ma! NO HANDS!", and many more.
It's awesome that we can see each other's warm face from up to 9,000 miles away whenever we want.
What's the big deal? Oh, you don't have an Apple product? Sorry.
I get this is about an over-the-wire standard for video calls, but it seems silly to me. I'm a younger millennial, and looking at my recent calls, I have about a 10:1 ratio factime:telephone. If I can use facetime I will, every time, and I don't actually know anyone who doesn't prefer it. Facial expressions, situational context of the person on the other end, and being able to seemlessly show something are all so valuable
Its ironic to me that science fiction writers assumed that people would prefer video to audio-only for regular conversations, but now that just about everyone has the option of video for every call (if they're using a smartphone) they still usually prefer audio-only, or even better yet text (which is even lower bandwidth than audio).
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 57.6 ms ] threadThe title should have been, "We're living in the future!"
There's more of a case for long-distance video calls, but even long-distance voice calling was so expensive in the pre-cell phone era that it was rarely used for personal calls. Even the video calling we do today looks more like business -- scheduled conference calls -- than the personal phone calls of old.
People had troubles in finding a place to put the device (most put it in a "neutral" area, like a corridor), and there was the "etiquette" issue of allowing video or not (because of not being "ready" for the video call).
This is how the devices looked:
http://rxcontrol.free.fr/Visiophone/
Here is a related paper (French):
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01671120/document
I had colleagues who put the tags on their children to act as baby trackers so they could monitor while they worked from other rooms.
If you're going to argue that we don't really have picturephones, just computers that do video and audio over the network, you should argue we don't really have a telephone network anymore, just a computer network that routes audio, video, and other things. The backhaul for my parents' "landline" is 5G.
This not a phone call. This is cable television.
> The reality is, we don’t have true picture phones. We have computers with sufficient bandwidth to carry live video and audio. Your FaceTime call is going over the data network.
So, the former is a video phone, despite being one way, but the latter is not a video phone because it was sent over a "data network."
POTS is a "data network". Hence the ability to transmit faxes, or use TCP/IP with it.
https://www.dummies.com/article/academics-the-arts/language-...
I really struggle on meetings when video is off. I have a harder time reading the audience/individual and also expressing myself. There's a lot that is communicated visually.
My entire extended family use videophone everyday for the past 12 years. (We are a Deaf-related family). Heck, we can even sign to a FCC-certified operator and they'll translate into spoken words to just about ANYBODY (include the dreaded navigation of press-5-for-somewhere-in-the-IT-dept and voicemail hell) and do the reverse in turn ... many times a day.
The good part? During grocery shopping (you detest that, don't you, but you detest the rant-n-raving of the wrong selection more) and unsure of which can of chile con carne, chile w/o beans, chile with beans, chile beans, chile beans with meat or something to get, videophone your spouse and show the shelf racks.
Best for watching baby's first-step, graduation, first bicyling, "Look, Ma! NO HANDS!", and many more.
It's awesome that we can see each other's warm face from up to 9,000 miles away whenever we want.
What's the big deal? Oh, you don't have an Apple product? Sorry.