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There can be little doubt about the value of enhancing a communication with visual information. Pictures add another and very important element to the process of learning and comprehension. Moving pictures let us see the person to whom we are talking, creating a more natural and effective person-to-person communication. Taking it one step further, a truly collaborative effort is greatly enhanced when multiple persons can work on a document. Supporting all of this over a network can save a lot of money, time, shoe leather, and gasoline. Serving to supplement, but never replacing, face-to-face collaboration, video and multimedia networking has a legitimate place in the networked world.
Within the next few years, videoconferencing will be commonplace. Large organizations just cant deny its value, and the costs of the systems technologies are becoming quite reasonable. As costs continue to drop, small business, home business, and even consumer markets for multimedia equipment will expand greatly. Further, the networks are increasing in capability and soon will be able to support quality multimedia networking at reasonable cost. Infonetics Research estimates that 16% of desktops already are multimedia equipped and that 45% will be in 1998. Al Lill of the Gartner Group predicts that the next generation of PCs will have video processors built in, requiring only a $40 camera and $3 of software [14-24]. In the meantime and according to TeleSpan Publishing Group, about 30,000 desktop video systems were shipped in 1994 and another 80,000 or so in 1995 [14-25].
An application in point is that of telemedicine, which supports consultation and even remote diagnosis and treatment. A number of projects have successfully experimented with this concept, largely in support of remote clinics. Through a videoconferencing system and network, a nurse or medical technician in a remote clinic can gain the assistance of a doctor (even a specialist) located at a major urban hospital. The doctor can guide the technician through the process of diagnosis and treatment, viewing the patient over a videoconferencing network and perhaps viewing x-rays transmitted over the same high-quality, digital network. For that matter, a multipoint conference can be established so that the physician might consult with distant colleagues on a particularly difficult diagnosis and treatment plan. Taking the scenario one step further, the physician can even guide the technician through an emergency surgical procedure! Prescriptions, clearly, can be transmitted electronically to a local pharmacy. While such an application scenario currently is a bit unusual, it has been accomplished and is in daily use. The typical commercial enterprise might not find videoconferencing or multimedia networking to be a lifesaving application, they will be critical elements of the technology mix for those firms seeking to gain or maintain competitive advantage.
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