op computers) customers. A home user can view an MPEG2 video stream while browsing the Internet and making an Internet-based telephone call. Consider the following video communication applications: Video Communications: The Whole Picture Executive, task force, and board member meetings Project management Desktop-to-desktop communications (wired or wireless) Merger and acquisition management Collaborative-engineering, product development, and product review Product Support Legal protocol (depositions, testimony, and remote arraignment) Surveillance Emergency Response Distance Learning & Training Large multi-site meetings Key personnel recruitment Telemedicine and health care provisioning Consulting Inter-company meetings with customers, suppliers, and partners New product announcements to restricted audiences Although people generally associate video communication with business meetings, its applications are quite diverse and, ideally, creative. Following are some examples: To reunite families ravaged by the 2005 Tsunami disasters, VectorMAX Software donated video communications software and installed it onto IBM- donated laptops. Unicef, which said that many of the tens of thousands of children orphaned by the tsunami were unclaimed, and injured adult survivors lay unidentified in hospitals, put the computers in orphanages and in towns to help families find one another. The systems also served in cataloging the dead. The National Institutes of Health uses video communication to connect its 27 separate institutes and centers, as well as the 75 buildings on its campus. Video communication overcomes the time-consuming process of suiting-up to link workers in cleanrooms with co-workers outside. Moreover, online images do not introduce contamination, as do airborne-particulate-producing papers. Flight test engineers use video communication to share results with design engineers who are thousands of miles away. A trailing aircraft captures video that all parties instantly view together, while they are fresh, and allows