Summary

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Please check back later for the full article.

Video-mediated communication (VMC) has a long history. Fictional depictions of variously named VMC systems began appearing in late 19th century illustrations and novels as plausible extensions of telegraphy, telephony, and filmic and televisual moving pictures. AT&T demonstrated experimental one-way combined telephone and television streams in 1927, and the German Post Office had a fully operative public videophone system as early as 1936. However, despite the apparent early progress, VMC has had a surprisingly rocky path to mainstream use—indeed, it might even be argued that VMC is still not the ubiquitous medium one would assume of “the next best thing to being there” (as Julius Molnar said of the AT&T Mod I in the 1960s). Commercial VMC and research have intertwined themes. Changing technologies and difficulties in institutional and domestic commercialization are set against research into the value, form-factors, and member methods for conveying social presence over distance. These issues are as relevant to current VMC as they have ever been, and augmented reality technologies will introduce yet more new opportunities and challenges.