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Video conferences are hard to manage because someone has to pan the camera
around the table or cut between views from separate cameras. Now iSight of
Israel is patenting a system that selects a shot of who is talking from a
cylindrical image (W0 98/47291). A camera with a multifaceted mirror produces an
overlapping series of images of all the participants, which blend into a
panoramic view. This is too large to display on a single TV screen, so it is
electronically distorted into a wraparound cylinder. A computer senses who is
talking and spins the cylinder so that the speaker’s face is always in the
centre of the screen.