• Illustration: RoundTable Conference Room Device

A new audio and video device for conference rooms called RoundTable will make Web conferences more closely resemble face-to-face meetings. RoundTable captures a panoramic image of the conference room in which it is installed and can determine which person in the room is speaking. The product will interest geographically dispersed organizations that rely on videoconferencing today, emulating some capabilities of traditional videoconferencing equipment at a fraction of the cost. However, to be most useful the device requires Microsoft's Live Meeting 2007 client application used with either the forthcoming Live Meeting 2007 service or the recently released Communications Server 2007 product.

Panoramic Images, Speaker Detection

RoundTable will help make Live Meeting 2007 and Communications Server 2007 Web conferences more closely resemble face-to-face meetings. (For a graphic displaying the device, see the illustration "RoundTable Conference Room Device".) Web conferences are real-time, multiparty meetings where users communicate over an IP data network rather than the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Web conferences offer tools and services that can simplify the distribution of presentation materials, help presenters manage question-and-answer sessions, and provide more interaction between presenter and audience.

RoundTable plugs into a PC or laptop with a single USB cable and can also connect to a standard telephone jack. The device can function as a standard Web camera or merely as a speakerphone, but its most useful and interesting features are the following:

Panoramic image. RoundTable contains multiple Web cameras whose images the device combines into a 360-degree panoramic image (1056x144 pixels) of the space in which it is installed (the middle of a conference room in most cases). To view the panoramic image, customers must have a subscription to Live Meeting 2007 or deploy Communications Server 2007's Web conferencing features, and use the Live Meeting 2007 client for conferences.

Active-speaker detection. RoundTable also generates a standard image (up to 640x480 pixels) that is centered on the current speaker in the conference room, which eliminates a common frustration of teleconferencing—figuring out who is actually speaking. The product uses an array of microphones and information from the device's cameras to identify who is talking. Although RoundTable's panoramic image requires Microsoft's Web conferencing products, the active-speaker image should work with other Web conferencing software or services, such as WebEx.

Availability and Resources

RoundTable will be available in Sept. 2007 in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States, and it is expected to retail for about US$3,000. The company hopes to make the product available in other countries in the second half of 2008.

RoundTable information is available at www.microsoft.com/uc/products/roundtable.mspx.

Microsoft's main site for Communications Server 2007 is office.microsoft.com/en-us/communicationsserver/default.aspx.

Communications Server 2007's Web conferencing features are described in "Web Conferencing in Communications Server 2007" of of the Oct. 2007 Update.