Among giant corporations, Procter & Gamble has a valuable perspective on teleconferencing because it has been at it for so long.
Meanwhile, there will be more dependence on teleconferencing and other technologies to replace, or at least supplement, some routine travel.
They have a choice: when they call to seek an abortion, women who live far from city clinics can either take abortion medication in a distant office with the doctor on teleconference, or travel to the doctor.
Companies like Sprint and AT&T said minutes spent on teleconferencing have increased in recent months, although these are still a tiny fraction of what is spent on regular telephone calls or on business travel.
Though it then tapered off, the trend is clear: More than 78percentt of corporate travel managers surveyed last spring by the Business Travel Coalition, a lobbying group, said they had increased their reliance on teleconferencing and 86percentt said they planned to do so in 2002.
It constrains the healthcare and legal systems that rely on teleconferencing and routine transfers of large files.
As tech picks up and we can gather more realistic avatars with facial expression tracking, virtual chat rooms like AltspaceVR could really take on existing teleconferencing.
With her sales team and clients in Korea and Taiwan, she works to coax out the unspoken in one-on-one conversations, as they rarely express their thoughts unbidden, and certainly won't share them on a big teleconference call.
The first application the researchers have worked on is a teleconferencing one, but Schreer sees the system being applied in entertainment, as well.
"It doesn't involve scrapping the system and starting over," he said, speaking on a teleconference on behalf of the B.C.S. Presidential Oversight Committee.
