Video conferencing adds a new element that phone conversations lack. Of course the bandwidth for phone conversations is much lower than video conmmnications. There is an inherent tradeoff with video. You can either have high resolution or low bandwidth. I propose a way to get a high quality video signal and use extremely low bandwidth. With this new form of communication there are drawbacks and benefits. But first I should describe what I am proposing. The human body has a limited number of positions. What I am proposing is to have a way to monitor the position of a particular body part, say the eyes for example, and transmit that information to a decoder and display that information. To get a complete rendering of transmitter's body, a number of sensors would be needed to keep track of portions of the body. Once the sensors determine the body' s position, they can transmit the information to the decoder. There is current tecnnology that exists that can do this. Unfortunately the sender must be wearing a Full body suit outfitted with sensors. A camera could be used to monitor a person and then break that inmge down into a few positions for key body parts. Since a few locations are a lot less data to be sent than the entire camera image, the bandwidth requirements are small. The drawbacks are great enough that solutions might have to be found before this idea could be useful.

To see the drawbacks to this new form of conununication let's take a look at a typical session. To initiate a session one person would contact another through perhaps a modem. Since all that is being sent is a set of a few sensor positions and not the entire image, there must be an initial small library.' of images. Each person would have a set of pictures that show that person smiling, frowning, etc. so when the sensor picks up the person's lips curling downward there is a corresponding image of the person frowning. So once the two people make an initial contact there is the overhead of getting your library of facial expression to the other person. Once that is done all that needs to be sent is a few sensor positions. Depending on the communication medium this may prove to be too time consuming to be beneficial. To get the positions for the various body parts there must be some computer software that can take the camera image and analyze it. This software must be fast enough to avoid time delays that are typical to current video conferencing setups.