WHITHER VIDEO - PICTORIAL CULTURE AND TELEPRESENCE

Stopping to think becomes more important to do the harder that doing i t becomes. Television is very popular and has been used with great suc cess for many decades all over the world. Videotelephony is relatively unpopular, despite long study and some recent advances. It seems obvi ous to adopt the pictorial culture of television as a guide to the dev elopment of videotelephony. The authors believe this assumption is not only fundamentally mistaken, but is partly responsible for the unpopu larity of videotelephony. To encourage broader and deeper debate, some artistic and engineering aspects of pictorial culture are discussed i n exploring how videotelephony might be made more appealing. The impli cations for future telepresence systems and for new 'virtual-world' mu ltimedia environments are discussed and topics for further work sugges ted.