Comments on: Microsoft loses face as Teams Intelligent Cameras becomes a third-party feature https://practical365.com/microsoft-lose-face-as-teams-intelligent-cameras-becomes-a-third-party-feature/ Practical Office 365 News, Tips, and Tutorials Tue, 13 Dec 2022 15:49:16 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3.2 By: Andrew Seabrook https://practical365.com/microsoft-lose-face-as-teams-intelligent-cameras-becomes-a-third-party-feature/#comment-244677 Wed, 12 Oct 2022 18:28:06 +0000 https://practical365.com/?p=57044#comment-244677 Steve! Great post, lots of similar thoughts to what I have had over the past couple years as a Teams room junkie.

There’s a blog post out today you might want to look at:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/what-s-new-for-microsoft-teams-rooms-teams-devices-and/ba-p/3631513

Looks like the feature is now going to be called “IntelliFrame” and they’re going for a hybrid approach, so even if you don’t have the advertised OEM stuff, Teams will still be able to do it:

“In Teams Rooms outfitted with a camera capable of running advanced OEM AI features, remote attendees see an IntelliFrame view of the room’s participants. Poly, Logi, Jabra, and Neat are partners with this technology available this year.

For Teams Rooms equipped with all other existing camera types, IntelliFrame delivers an enhanced video gallery experience by leveraging the latest Microsoft-built AI models running in the Microsoft cloud, which process the video stream from the room. This experience will be available in early 2023.”

Would love to know your thoughts!

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By: Steve Goodman https://practical365.com/microsoft-lose-face-as-teams-intelligent-cameras-becomes-a-third-party-feature/#comment-242372 Fri, 26 Aug 2022 17:31:05 +0000 https://practical365.com/?p=57044#comment-242372 In reply to Daniel.

What has made me laugh/cry has been the vendor view – “Let’s do a demo of our kit” – and you’ll see a device – maybe like the one you mention – doing face detection and the vendor rep will use *cardboard cut outs of people* to “prove how well it works”. At the same time, I’ve seen customers who have added “our people” picture walls in meeting rooms which naturally, confuse these devices. Yet… they wouldn’t confuse, say, your Surface Pro, or Kinect on an XBox 360.

I’ve NOT tested the E70, but suspect because they didn’t put the cameras side-by-side, so that it could infer three dimensions, it would have the same issue; unless they are actually performing much more complex operations, such as attempting to track eye landmark movement such as blinking. I do love that the Poly E70 states it has 20 megapixel dual 4K sensors; which as 4K is 8.3 megapixels is a little confusing.. are they adding together the sensor combined count to make it sound better?

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By: Steve Goodman https://practical365.com/microsoft-lose-face-as-teams-intelligent-cameras-becomes-a-third-party-feature/#comment-242371 Fri, 26 Aug 2022 17:24:52 +0000 https://practical365.com/?p=57044#comment-242371 In reply to Harald Steindl.

Regarding the MTR on Android – I struggled to find specifications on what each MTR on Android vendor puts inside the kit – if you have found out a good public source, I’ll gladly look. Having a collection of various ARM-based single-board computers – some with AI-coprocessors and some without, there’s a variety of options other than the Snapdragon chips.

I’ve been learning about the underlying technology – the Intel Movidius Myriad X (in the Intel NCS2 USB form) is hanging out of one of my lab devices, and are fairly useful for testing OpenCV. The Google Coral equivalent is hanging out of another lab device and represents (somewhat) of replicating the capability to do this stuff on a higher-end Snapdragon SOC. The price of these – even in USB-stick form is low enough that every Teams certified room camera should have this capability, rather than it being a premium feature; but frankly a $5 ESP32-AI MCU can perform face detection in real time using compiled code, and older ARM CPUs (32-bit or 64-bit) or 10 year old Intel x64 CPUs can do so, too.

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By: Harald Steindl https://practical365.com/microsoft-lose-face-as-teams-intelligent-cameras-becomes-a-third-party-feature/#comment-242329 Thu, 25 Aug 2022 11:34:54 +0000 https://practical365.com/?p=57044#comment-242329 Very well pointed out!
Isn’t this a classic example “you don’t know, what you don’t know yet” ?
Indeed MSFT was quite flexible with their definition what a smart camera is, and where the smartness should be?
* In the OEM’s camera like in a huddly camera having a mighty Intel Movidius Myriad X chip?
Good for the OEM, but hardly in the interest of MSFT, right?
* In the local client
There should be already enough CPU/GPU juice in every MTR on Windows but how about MTR on Android?
Their Smartdragons can do amazing things (as your TikTok example shows) but are the OEMs smart enough to build something comparable?
* Back in the cloud? Sure this would be their wet drean, that everybody must use (and pay for?) their cloud services.
I am by far not smart enough if such an approach is feasable without having some healthly dose of onPrem power.

Being equally at home in MS Teams, Zoom and Webex Room Systems I find it sometimes even hilarious to see how they watch each other, claim that there version is much better and just to see adopting the other guy’s solution when the initial dust settled.

Likewise AUDIO is similarly interesting but here the old paradigm is still valid: VC vendors mostly have no clue about audio so it is no wonder, that there is much less innovation there. Although, audio needs way less cpu juice, so would be much easier to do smart things. OK, I’ll stop here…

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By: Daniel https://practical365.com/microsoft-lose-face-as-teams-intelligent-cameras-becomes-a-third-party-feature/#comment-242303 Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:56:06 +0000 https://practical365.com/?p=57044#comment-242303 Excellent analysis. After testing the Poly E70 for a week we gladly packed it up again and returned it to the vendor. For almost $3k we simply expected more. It’s a shame Microsoft dropped the ball on this.

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