Altia Systems Wants You to See the Big PictureAltia Systems Wants You to See the Big Picture

This startup delivers a panoramic immersive video experience with plug-and-play 4K camera and service.

Video collaboration company Altia Systems, a Gartner UC vendor to watch this year, is upping its coolness quotient with a second-generation release of its sub-$1,000, plug-and-play video camera for panoramic conferencing experiences.

The PanaCast 2 video camera, announced last week at Microsoft Ignite and set for release this summer, has earned recognition by Gartner and others as the industry's first ultra-fast panoramic video camera. Not much bigger than your average computer mouse, the PanaCast 2 delivers an impressive video experience -- even from a booth on a busy exhibition floor, as I know from stopping by to talk with the Altia Systems team at Ignite.

As I saw, the PanaCast 2 easily plugs into a USB port, and delivers an immersive 180-degree wide, 54-degree tall field of view, with crystal clear 3840 x 1080 pixel screen resolution and video delivered using 4K ultra-HD compression. If you think that's overkill for your average business video conference, then Altia CEO Aurangzeb Khan has a question for you: As a remote participant, have you ever tried reading the writing on a whiteboard during a video collaboration session?

While audio conferencing has been a staple of business life, video conferencing has been a harder sell. High-end systems are too costly for everyday use, and desktop video solutions might be good for two or three participants, but the experience can be frustratingly limited -- not to mention of questionable quality. And while we have seen some positive strides in the user friendliness and quality of in-room video systems, none are taking quite the same approach as Altia.

The company's goal, Khan said, is to create an inexpensive but superlative video collaboration experience by broadening the field of view and giving participants "volition," or, in other words, a choice of what they see. The choice comes in teaming up the PanaCast 2 camera with Altia's PanaCast Experience service, which lets each participant choose where to focus during any given moment of a video conference without affecting the view of any other attendee.

For example, as a remote team member, rather than look at the person speaking, perhaps I'd like to watch how my manager, an on-site participant, is reacting to the presentation content. Other video room systems typically use voice-activation technology to zoom in on the speaker, providing no other viewing option for participants. But PanaCast Experience gives individuals full control of camera selection, pan, and zoom.

The PanaCast 2 achieves panoramic video at close proximity by miniaturizing three video cameras and putting them in such a small footprint. Altia has received five patents and is awaiting word on another 27 that it's filed in areas such as computer vision and video optimization, Khan said.

PanaCast works seamlessly with popular Web collaboration apps and services, including Cisco WebEx, Google Hangouts, Zoom, Skype, and Skype for Business. Regarding the latter, PanaCast Experience works stand-alone or integrated via the Skype for Business interface -- i.e., all a user would have to do is drag and drop a PanaCast video camera into the meeting space, as this video shows, Khan said. See below for a depiction of how PanaCast fits into a Microsoft environment.

As I mentioned, PanaCast 2 has a low entry cost, at $995 per camera. The PanaCast Experience service costs $20 per user monthly, but companies do not need to buy named licenses, Khan said. Altia already has 350 users of its first-generation camera -- 80% are in the enterprise and 20% are consumers, he added.

One last note, which should be of interest to anyone in IT wondering about the network hit of PanaCast's ultra-HD video conferencing. The video streaming starts out at low bandwidth and builds up so it doesn't stress the network, Khan said. PanaCast stitches together each feed, correcting the perspective in real time, to deliver a "human view." Although perhaps needless to say, he added, "there's a lot of math going on here."

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