There have been many false starts for videoconferencing technology. As each new innovation is announced, there are always those who use it to announce the death of business travel.
However, a new technology, called TeleHuman 2, announced by Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario may actually herald a new era.
Dr Roel Vertegaal, professor of human-computer interaction at the Queen's University School of Computing, has developed a holographic projection system that has hints of Star Trek's holodeck.
The system is based on a ring of intelligent projectors mounted above and around a reflective, human-sized cylindrical pod. The display projects a light field composed of many images, one for every degree of angle, so users need not wear a headset or 3D glasses to see each other.
"Face-to-face interaction transfers an immense amount of non-verbal information," says Dr Vertegaal. "This information is lost in online tools, promoting poor online behaviours. Users miss the gestures, facial expressions, and eye contact that bring nuance, emotional connotation and ultimately empathy to a conversation. TeleHuman 2 injects these missing elements into long-distance conversations with a realism that cannot be achieved with a Skype or Facetime video chat."
A story in The Times recently also shows that companies are innovating in the way they run meetings.
Amazon, it turns out, has some interesting rules regarding meetings.
The first is the "two-pizza" rule. Don't hold meetings with more participants than can be fed with two pizzas.
The second is that PowerPoint is banned. Its loss will not be lamented by many.
The third is perhaps the strangest — every meeting starts in silence. This is not meditation but rather a chance for everyone to actually read the documents describing the background to the meeting.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told a conference recently, "For every meeting, someone from the meeting has prepared a six-page, narratively structured memo that has real sentences and topic sentences and verbs. It's not just bullet points. It's supposed to create the context for the discussion."
Since meetings are the very reason that business travel exists in the first place, it is perhaps time to look again at why we have them, how meetings should be run to make them effective and — if TeleHuman 2 is a success — whether we actually need to travel in the first place.