Firm’s 2-Way Video Device May Revolutionize Medicine
Wrapping new concepts around the guts of an old spy satellite system, a Simi Valley defense contractor this week announced it has perfected a two-way video device that could revolutionize the worlds of medicine, film editing and computers.
The Whittaker Corp.--long known as the world’s largest supplier of aircraft flow-control valves--has dipped its toes into the fast-moving currents of commercial communications research in a partnership with Pacific Bell.
And together they came up with a two-way system of computers, switches and software that they call Video Mail.
“We’ve asked ourselves the question, ‘Who would use this?’ ” Whittaker’s James B. Schultz said of the $100,000 system that requires high-speed phone lines costing up to $8,000 a month. “We built this for business-to-business applications.”
Film editors and physicians can use Video Mail to move and manipulate video images in real time over telephone lines between two remote sites, he said.
It can be plugged into the growing global telemedicine network--in which doctors use computer modems to review patients’ X-rays and CAT scans from far-flung sites. Or it could allow a film editor in Los Angeles to collaborate with a director in San Francisco on cutting a movie, said Schultz, Whittaker’s director of business development.
One Video Mail communication-storage computer, or “server,” can handle 96 two-way video “conversations” at once, and Whittaker hopes to expand that capacity, Schultz said.
But the company still must work out some kinks--such as the link between Video Mail and commercially available film-editing systems, such as Avid--before the product goes to market in January, he said.
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Doctors and CD-ROM producers say that Video Mail could completely change the way they work.
On the other hand, computer experts warn, it could just get tossed aside as another overpriced detour in their quest for the Holy Grail of instant worldwide video communication.
Major phone companies such as Sprint, MCI and GTE have been laboring in their own labs for the past two years, then running test after test in Hollywood multimedia studios, trying to perfect a two-way real-time video image manipulation system.
And while some have built two-way video control systems--such as the Drums service due out this fall from Sprint and Silicon Graphics--Whittaker’s system appears to be the first to act as a pipeline through which entire video files can be viewed and altered at both ends, at the blistering rate of 200 megabytes per second, industry experts say.
Video Mail’s future, warns computer guru John Perry Barlow, lies in its cost.
The question is, can the pricey, high-capacity ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) phone lines used by the Whittaker-PacBell system grab enough business to bring down their cost and become a worldwide standard?
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“I think this is where things are heading for all of us,” said Barlow, a Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which monitors and promotes the freedom of the worldwide computer community.
“It’s generally encouraging news,” he said. “But I don’t think we’re going to see ATM crystallize into the standard it needs to become until there are significant commercial uses for it.”
Adam Reeves, a market researcher for a Silicon Valley computer industry consulting firm called DataQuest, agreed: “The thing that’s going to hold it back is that there has to be widespread use.”
But USC doctors and Hollywood producers say they are already excited about early tests of Video Mail.
Multimedia producer Winston Johnson, sitting in his West Hollywood studio late this summer, used the system to edit a short video--via phone lines--on a computer in San Francisco.
Doctors at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center have already held demonstrations of the system for members of Congress, said Dr. Fred George, radiology professor at the university’s School of Medicine.
George heads a brain trust of doctors and computer engineers who last spring linked a Whittaker-PacBell server in Gardena, via Video Mail, to supercomputers at Northrop and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Using the network, a team of doctors scattered all over the country peered into computer screens simultaneously, reviewed a single patient’s X-rays, photos and medical charts and conferred on a treatment plan, George said.
Networking like this saves precious hours--even days--that would have been wasted assembling the team and medical records at one table, George said. In that kind of time, a patient could deteriorate or die, he said.
The system also lets doctors safely store data-bulky medical images such as X-rays and mammograms--which sometimes get lost in paper files or mislaid when doctors borrow them without returning them--in one central computer, George said. And doctors can use it to confer quickly and efficiently on the best way to treat a patient whose life may depend on a quick diagnosis, he said.
“Not to be too idealistic--we’re planning a global network that should improve the lives of every man, woman and child on the planet,” George said Thursday. With a system like Video Mail already linked into that network, he said, “there’s a growing sense that this is going to be accomplished.”
Whittaker initially developed the technology for the military and intelligence communities, who wanted a system to record and play back live video from spy satellites.
The Simi Valley firm joined with PacBell about a year ago to develop a commercial system.
