September&#146;s suicide jet attacks have given business travelers a new reason to stay on the ground. When it isn&#146;t absolutely necessary to fly, many are now trying teleconferencing instead. But teleconferencing, in its current form, has many drawbacks, including poor sound and image quality and unacceptable delays. Plus there is the eye-contact problem. Because the camera and the monitor are not in the same spot, it appears to the person with whom you&#146;re interacting that you&#146;re shifty or aren&#146;t paying attention. Worse, if the camera is mounted on top of the monitor, it looks as if you&#146;re trying to peek down the shirt of the person you&#146;re talking to. (Teleconferencers have dubbed this particular setup &#145;&#145;perv-vision.&#146;&#146;)

The eye-to-eye problem is being solved by researchers working on &#145;&#145;tele-immersion,&#146;&#146; a technology that goes several steps beyond teleconferencing to create the illusion that people separated by distance are together in the same room. Using high-bandwidth networks and clusters of video cameras linked to banks of computers, tele-immersion scans a person&#146;s face and body and creates a kind of living statue that other tele-immersion participants see displayed on a large screen. The overall effect is like talking face to face to another person, separated by a pane of glass.

At least that&#146;s the plan. Effective tele-immersion requires immense amounts of computer-processing power and ultrafast networks. For now, the closest thing to true tele-immersion is the work of a Los Angeles company called Eyematic, whose products will allow people to telecommunicate using 3-D animated avatars &#150; digital puppets, basically &#150; that respond to participants&#146; facial movements. By conveying only basic gestures (blink eyes, grimace, tilt head) and not the entire scanned and digitized face, Eyematic&#146;s avatars perform smoothly even on standard dial-up modems.