Guest blogger Josh Tyler is a member of the Texai team at Willow Garage.
Willow Garage is busy building the next version of its Texai remote presence platform with VP8, the video codec used in WebM.
In short, Texai is a two-way videoconferencing app on a tele-operated robotic platform (for more details, see the piece about Texai in the New York Times). Video and audio quality are critical to providing the best user experience on Texai. We've evaluated several video codecs and found VP8's image quality, low latency and tolerance to packet loss far better than anything else we tested.
The video below shows VP8 running on one of our systems.
(If you have a WebM-enabled browser and are enrolled in the YouTube HTML5 beta the video will play in WebM HTML5, otherwise it will play in Flash Player.)
We're also looking for help! If you're interested in helping us create an incredible, high-fidelity user experience, either by joining our team, partnering on development, or by being added to our early customer interest list, please email us at texai-info@willowgarage.com.