Video teleconferencing is often touted for its potential to promote better communications and curb expensive travel. Yet technology for such virtual face-to-face meetings has yet to catch on as a routine business tool. Among its perceived failings: the inability of participants to make eye contact (due to camera placement limitations), the need for a dedicated "dry room" away from office or lab floors, and a lack of shared workspace for collaborative brainstorming.

Given the expected development of far greater bandwidth than is available with current data lines, what is the next step toward more realistic virtual meetings? The answer is known as tele-immersion, a conceptual hybrid of virtual reality and Star Trek's Holodeck. One of the principal applications areas for Internet2 (a research project involving 170 academic institutions and 50 corporations to develop tomorrow's faster Internet), tele-immersion visually replicates, in real time and in three dimensions, slabs of space surrounding remote participants in a cybermeeting. The result is a shared, simulated environment that makes it appear as if everyone is in the same room.