“It was all out of sync,” says Accenture’s Modruson. “There just wasn’t enough bandwidth, so you’d have artifacts, and the voices would come from all different directions.” In some cases, Modruson says, it required hours of IT support. As a result, users, frustrated by the cumbersome process, often wouldn’t use it again, resulting in lower adoption rates (the killer of any corporate technology).

Video conferences also donned very unattractive apparatuses. “The old video conference was a camera on top of a TV set on top of a dessert cart,” says Howard S. Lichtman, president and founder of the Human Productivity Lab. When people have a meeting in person, they sit at desks or meeting tables, not dessert tables, Lichtman adds.

Lichtman also says companies paid very little attention to how they set up their meeting rooms, which resulted in very poor audio quality. The echoes of linoleum floors of old office buildings, for instance, sent feedback into the microphone. The televisions were too small for the subjects to feel engaged with their remote colleague. Add in large, obtrusive cameras and Lichtman says the typical video conferencing user became overloaded with stimuli.

“The human brain was having a fight between the distracting medium and the meeting at hand,” Lichtman says.

Video Conferencing Gets a Face-Lift

But a few years ago, video conferencing received a boost. Vendors like Cisco and HP, along with a bunch of pure plays, gave the technology a face-lift. They changed its name from the stodgy "video conference" to the more exotic “telepresence,” hoping to reflect an experience delivered in HD where the boundaries between two locations became blurred. They sped things up by using the Internet Protocol (IP) for voice and audio rather than ISDN as a primary means of connection. Bandwidth increased. They used large flat panel screens in high definition, allowing people to see each other clearly and in life size.

“The quality is now there,” says Forrester’s Schooley. “Sometimes there can be a [slight] delay, but it’s not something the human eye picks up.”

In addition, the Human Productivity Lab’s Lichtman says vendors paid more attention to designing floor plans and specifications for the meeting rooms in which a telepresence session takes place. They first improved acoustics and lighting to ensure good audio quality. Perhaps most significantly, they tried to replicate what a regular meeting room in the Western world looks like.

A typical room equipped for telepresence looks like this: There are three two-person desks, slightly curved and linked together into a semicircle. Like any corporate meeting room, they have comfy (and preferably adjustable) office chairs so the six participants can sit at an equal level. This represents half of your conference table. Across from the physical desks are three giant flat screens. They are linked together just like the desks, forming another semicircle. The cameras are generally mounted discreetly on top of or sometimes below the screen, but they’re barely noticeable. Microphones are similarly out of the way. Once a video conference starts and the screens turn on, the six participants in the room see six other participants, sitting two abreast at their three desks, in another office with the same arrangement.