Video conferencing has been getting more ubiquitous in recent years with more and more offices using off the shelf and inexpensive video conferencing systems for conferencing and meeting purposes. Video conferencing has also gone beyond the simple device in the office meeting room to be used in various other traditional environments like the classroom. It has also been heavily used in areas of surveillance, security and emergency response.
One of the biggest advantages of video conference is the ability for people to communicate without having to travel huge distances. Video conference, with the help of computer networks, overcomes the geographical barriers to bring people that are located around the world to come together and communicate on a certain topic. This could be most widely seen in the office setting, where video conferencing sessions are usually set up for the main office to give a presentation to its sub office that may be located in another country.
Since these meetings could be quite frequent, this amounts to huge savings by the company because the company no longer needs to spend money on expenses associated with travel for its employees just for a meeting. Because of this, educational presentation and business meetings can be easily and cheaply conducted. Traditionally, meetings with people that are not located in the office are often done through a speaker phone. A speaker phone transmits voices through a central microphone. Although it is still quite widely used, it is not as useful as a video conferencing system.
One of the disadvantage is that there could be more then one people talking at the same time, and it is pretty hard to tell whose voice is coming out from the speaker phone if there are simultaneous communication going on. Second, a large part of communication is lost through the use of speaker phones only because it cannot transmit unspoken body language. Body language constitutes a large part of human to human communication.
Video conferencing systems allow either parties to see each other in real time, therefore the subtleties of the communicate from body language are still preserved. Of course, since video conferencing also transmits video signals in real time, people can discuss issues simultaneous and there will be no confusion on who posted the question or the answers. In conclusion, video conferencing systems can stimulate better brainstorming sessions and better discussions sessions which greatly aids knowledge and information sharing. With technology being improved everyday and more vendors entering the video conferencing systems market, the technology looks set to quickly replace the traditional speaker phone as well as becoming more affordable for companies of any size to acquire one. The possible uses for communication using simultaneous video conferencing is limitless and its widely accepted because at the end of the day, people want to talk to people and not just speaking to a speaker phone.
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