The widespread popularity of video conferencing has redefined corporate conventions around the world, making life significantly easier for both managers and employees.
Having reached its zeitgeist during the COVID-19 pandemic, video conferencing was the natural solution for millions of people, now working from home, who still needed to communicate with their peers beyond simple Slack messages.
Fast forward to today, and with the rise of remote workers and cross-country teams, the most practical way for any enterprise—large or small—to communicate is through video calls.
That’s why we’ve decided to examine the current direction of video conferencing and see what exciting innovations the future might hold for us.
Artificial Intelligence
I know, I know, you’re tired of hearing about AI. But whether it’s writing or video production, it's been steadily making its way into nearly every industry, and video conferencing is no exception. Even today, we can see glimpses of our neatly summarized, bulletpoint-ridden future when we look at Microsoft’s recent additions to Teams.
Copilot will review meeting transcripts, give you quick meeting summaries, suggest follow-up questions, and allow you to interrogate it afterward if you missed something. It also gives you in-meeting chat highlights so you can focus on the important stuff instead of sifting through fluff.
Now, instead of frantically taking notes while your boss switches from topic to topic, you can actually focus on the conversation and let AI handle the rest. Of course, current generative AI models have their issues and won’t really do a flawless job, but the concept itself is nothing short of remarkable.
One can only assume that as these models get better with time, they’ll eventually become an integral part of all video communication, keeping a detailed backlog of events, phrases, and tasks at your fingertips.
Hardware Improvements
Now you might be thinking “Oh, how exciting can webcams really be?” but the likes of Yealink video conferencing brands have been producing a whole slew of futuristic meeting equipment for over 20 years now.
We’re talking full-room conferencing setups, higher-resolution cameras, and giant displays that make your average standup meeting feel like a galactic federation conference. All of this obviously comes at a price. But in exchange for a hefty sum of money, you’ll be showered in a dizzying selection of AV equipment that makes you feel like you’re in an alternate reality.
You can even get 360° cameras for your conferencing room that automatically zone in on your employee's faces. Dystopian? Maybe. Cool? Certainly.
It’s obvious that as technology evolves as a whole, the video conferencing industry will follow along and it’s easy to imagine a future where all of these hardware upgrades crescendo into a truly sci-fi experience.
Virtual Reality
When Mark Zuckerberg bought Oculus for 2 billion dollars all the way back in 2014, people were understandably confused. The concepts of social media and virtual reality fusing into some sort of monstrous attention sink seemed too far-fetched for the innocent inhabitants of the mid-2010s.
Seven years later, Zuckerberg unveiled the Metaverse, a fully digital virtual reality space full of eerily legless avatars that was his best idea for a reality substitute. To absolutely no one's surprise, it failed miserably due to lackluster presentation, high cost of entry, and technical limitations. But the idea of a fully or partially digital space as an avenue for communication remained alive and well.
Fast forward a few years, and Apple released the Vision Pro. In typical Apple fashion, it was beautiful, limited, and obscenely expensive. It had a lot of cool things going for it, but the absolutely bizarre-looking avatars that it would generate from a face scan for Facetime calls had to be our favorite.
Even Apple, a company with absurd amounts of money and technical know-how, failed to make VR/AR viable in a remote communication setting. However, as this technology gets more sophisticated, we can easily envision what fully immersive, deeply interactive video conference calls could look like.
What to Expect
Out of the three potential avenues for progress that we’ve covered today, AI and direct hardware upgrades seem to be the most likely to actually tangibly change our video conferencing experience.
Even though VR/AR can show some promise as the tech evolves, it’s too half-baked to actually prove useful for now.
So, despite the lack of any revolutionary interaction methods, there’s a lot to be excited about, especially if you’re a results-focused professional who wants to outsource their note-taking to AI while marveling at themselves in 4K resolution!
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