Whither video? pictorial culture and telepresence

Stopping to think becomes more important to do the harder that doing it becomes. Television is very popular and has been used with great success for many decades all over the world. Videotelephony is relatively unpopular, despite long study and some recent advances. It seems obvious to adopt the pictorial culture of television as a guide to the development of videotelephony. The authors believe this assumption is not only fundamentally mistaken, but is partly responsible for the unpopularity of videotelephony. To encourage broader and deeper debate, some artistic and engineering aspects of pictorial culture are discussed in exploring how videotelephony might be made more appealing. The implications for future telepresence systems and for new 'virtual-world' multimedia environments are discussed and topics for further work suggested.