We recently hired our first remote employee and we've been experimenting with telepresence. Our conclusion is that it's slightly flaky but certainly ready for prime-time for a technically-oriented company like us. On our connection the picture quality isn't great (640x480), but good enough that it seems like the person is in the room. The audio is more important than video and it syncs perfectly with the person's lips moving which is extremely important. (That was the major problem when we tried it 3 years ago.)
There are two services that we use:
Vidyo is a pay-for service where you can either purchase a $7000 video conference router and use it as much as you want. Or go to a third party provider and pay ~3c/minute. But for 1-on-1 calls we use Skype--the quality is the same and it's free.
One of the keys to having a good experience is to buy a good speakerphone. We use the USB Phoenix Duet (~$130). If you rely on the camera's phone it greatly detracts from the experience.
In a few months, I will be moving out of state but will continue to work remote for my current company. One of my tasks between now and then is to get our "system" in place for dealing with this (eventually we will take on outside people that have never worked in-office for us, but I and a designer that works remote already are out "pilot program").
We're small and would line to make do with consumer-level solutions. I have been wondering if Cisco's Umi (home Telepresence) is what we're looking for. Nothing else has really jumped out - Skype is OK for desktop-to-desktop 1-on-1 chat but I don't know if it's a solution for our meeting room...
I've been looking for a plugin API to add this capability to web apps for several years now, and have been let down by every option out there.
The closest you can get is TokBox, which seems to have abandoned development on its API about 2 years ago, before they got it to a working state.
Somebody needs to start a startup in this space and get it working well enough to charge me money for it. It should take you about a day to get it working by cobbling together Flash sample code and a license to their crazy-expensive media server.
Let me know when it's ready and I'll beta test it for you.
Or you could use/contribute to the open source Red5 RTMP server. Back when I was consulting, we developed an educational assisted-reading app using Red5 and it worked great.
There are two services that we use:
Vidyo is a pay-for service where you can either purchase a $7000 video conference router and use it as much as you want. Or go to a third party provider and pay ~3c/minute. But for 1-on-1 calls we use Skype--the quality is the same and it's free.
One of the keys to having a good experience is to buy a good speakerphone. We use the USB Phoenix Duet (~$130). If you rely on the camera's phone it greatly detracts from the experience.
http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Audio-Mt202-Duet-Speakerpho/
The camera doesn't seem that important to the experience but we like Microsoft's LifeCam:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-H5D-00001-LifeCam-Cinema/