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German research house Fraunhofer IIS has announced a HD video conferencing technology for the home.
With a demonstration planned for the IFA 2010 technology show in Berlin starting this Friday, the telepresence@home project aims to deliver a “sameroom” experience despite the distance between users.
Fraunhofer said that the low delay, high quality audio and video would be the first such system to allow users to experience "completely natural conversation just as if the participants were sitting in the same room."
“Current low delay video technologies require either a much higher bit-rate or rely on very expensive dedicated hardware,” said Dr. Nikolaus Faerber, low delay video project manager at Fraunhofer IIS.
“However, Fraunhofer’s solution is based on PC hardware, which is widely available at a very competitive price. The result is an HD video conferencing system for the home that delivers the best possible communication experience at a low cost.”
Fraunhofer’s low delay video technology consists of low delay, high-quality video encoding and decoding based on H.264 in conjunction with a custom designed low delay frame grabber card. This combination enables high quality HD video at DSL compatible bit-rates well below 100 ms delay end-to-end.
