There are many historical time lines of videoconferencing on the Internet. A nice one is from an earlier post on this very blog. Most of these histories identify the AT&T ikonophone as the first working video phone. Although a milestone in its own right, it was not the first videophone as we think of them today. While the audio was two-way, the video was only one-way.
The first true videophone system, with two-way video and two-way audio, came about in Nazi Germany.
In their study of casual work interactions, Whittaker et al. (1994) concluded that coordination works best among people who are physically located in the same place because they have more opportunities to find others who are available to talk. Let’s face it, as much as we love Facebook and Twitter, talking to someone face-to-face still offers the most bang for your buck (Fish et al., 1992).
Face-to-face gives you immediate, continuous, personalized feedback to meet your specific needs with minimal ambiguity, and there’s something about eye contact, facial expressions, and seeing the words come out of someone’s mouth that makes the response more “true” and motivational. Personally speaking, I’m more likely to trust a direct “yes” from someone’s mouth and do something about it than from an email or memo with the same information. The special quality of face-to-face is such that at Stanford Hospital, telephone and email are used to set up meetings, but decisions are only made face-to-face.
This makes videoconferencing a natural candidate for getting that face-to-face feedback when physical face-to-face is not possible. In fact, Fish et al. (1992) found that when they created a prototype videoconference system that was easy and convenient to use, people always preferred to use the videophone over the audio-only phone. (I’d like to add, by the way, that VSee is incredibly convenient to install and use—I mean incredibly convenient.) Keep in mind that while it’s encouraging to find that easy accessibility encourages videophone Continue reading
