Take a look at this very in depth review of the Microsoft Office Roundtable video conferencing system. This thing looks very slick!

The RoundTable actually installs two USB camera devices. The first is the Active Speaker which uses the RoundTable's 6 microphones to locate where in the room the active speaker is and then focus one of the 5 cameras onto that person. I suspect it may actually use 2 cameras to focus on a person, since it always appears that the speaker is "centered" which probably would require at least 2 camera images and then the images are "spliced" together, processed, and then transmitted over the USB cable. The second USB camera device is the panoramic camera which combines the 5 camera images into a single panoramic image.

Next, I initiated a Live Meeting session in the conference room and went back to my desk to join the meeting. Unbeknownst to me, by the time I got to my desk, some TMC sales team members walked into the conference room to start a meeting. When I launched my LM 2007 client I saw Anthony Graffeo, one of TMC's sales staff staring right into one of the 5 triangular mirrors located just above the cameras. I headed over the conference room to tell them I could see and hear everything that was going on. After giving a brief demo, Anthony said, "that frickin thing is awesome!". I heard similar comments from other TMCers over the next few days - including "That thing is cool" and "Wow! What is that?"

During my tests with Office Live Meeting 2007, I was able to see the entire conference room in the panoramic view. The other video view is the "active speaker" and it would change to whoever was speaking. It was actually quite accurate and surprisingly fast. When I tested it with Rich Tehrani, Joe Fabiano, Mike Genaro, and Dave Rodriguez, we all took turns speaking and the camera view would almost instantly switch.

Overall, the video quality was excellent, Very smooth. Later on I did some more tests with just me in the conference room. I tried to trick the cameras by snapping my fingers above the microphone and the video wouldn't switch. I figured it must be using a combination of audio and video cues to determine the active speaker. A quick glance in the manual reveals, "To avoid switching to a non-human sound source, the video functions to assist in determining whether the sound detected is coming from an attendee or some other source." Answers that question!