Recently, I saw a cool demo on the "Round Table" device...Boy, is it neat or what! "Microsoft Office Roundtable" in my opinion is a totally new meeting experience with a rich set of unique features. This baby can detect & display the active speaker at any instant. Using six cameras, it stitches together different (360 deg) views & displays a panorama view of the conference participants at the remote end.  Imagine how a typical conference could be now ... and compare that with the traditional cumbersome Video-Tele Conferencing (VTC) where I would have to struggle to be "in the view" ! ['course the flip side is that now I can only hide under the table ;)]

Jeff Raikes said "you can record meetings, you can have synchronized views of the speakers or data, which also means that then if you miss the meeting you can attend after the meeting.

And one of the things that we've learned from our research is that it's possible to view the meeting in about half the time just by using good compression of the normal pauses in human speech, which, of course, leads to the great paradox: if you can review the meeting in half the time after the meeting, who wants to go to the meeting in the first place?"

The round table has the potential to change the way you and I collaborate in the future. Having said that, now the question is, how soon will it make to yours and my conference rooms???