Читать книгу Suddenly Virtual - Karin M. Reed - Страница 19

Video chat and collaboration did not arrive with COVID‐19. Rather, the earliest form of video chat appeared in 1927, when AT&T's Bell Labs debuted technology that would allow speakers to see someone in real time on a phone call. The one‐way TV demo call between then–Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and AT&T's President Walter Gifford sparked fascination but did not pave the way to public use, mainly due to a lack of network infrastructure.

In 1964, AT&T broke ground again with the introduction of the Picturephone at the World's Fair in New York City to much fanfare. However, a small‐scale rollout of the technology in 1970 did not gain the necessary momentum to make the Picturephone commercially viable. Attempts in the 1980s yielded the same results. The market was still reticent to shift from a traditional phone call to a video one, seemingly dooming video phones to a fate of failed innovation (Uenuma 2020).

It was only when the platform for video calls moved from phone lines to the Internet that video communication began to gain a foothold. In 1993, a University of Cambridge scientist connected a camera to the Web in an effort to monitor the department's coffee pot levels. He and his fellow scientists could check on those pots regularly online, which they did. However, to his great surprise, many other people did, too. His coffee pot cam in essence went viral (Kesby 2012).

The coffee pot cam could arguably be the genesis for a deluge of video communication innovation. Commercial webcams hit the marketplace. The “watery bloop” of a Skype call with its accompanying techno music became a familiar soundtrack for PC users in the early 2000s. But the real game‐changer was FaceTime on Apple's iPhone 4 in 2010, which prompted an endless string of software developers to create video‐based platforms for various mobile devices as well as desktops and laptops that normalized virtual video communication for the masses.

FaceTime and its cousins primed the pump for what would be one of the most extraordinary shifts in our history in the way we meet and conduct business communication.