video conferencing doesn't work

By strange coinicdence I was exposed to a number of people saying how video conferencing doesn't work - well enough to consider using them over flying even for people who think global warming is important.

It made me wonder what happened to all the research in to video conferanceing and multimedia over IP. Either they found out how to make it work and havn't managed to get the right stuff out. Or they found out how to make it work and know they can't make it work. Or they havent managed to figure out what went wrong. My vote is for the last option, its an interesting example of how everyone one know's it doesn't work but cannot put their finger on why - its a non discursive problem.

I did have a fun Idea of how to find out what is going wrong.

Take a group or groups forbid them to meet in real life ( they might live in the same building or room). then organise them to meet in a meeting room for meetings.

find a measure of the performance then begin to introduce restrictions. For example put up a partition in the real meeting room forcing everyone to look through a smallish screen sized holes at each other. Keep adding more problems ( (2) speeking through microphones to remove directionality) until the real meeting has as many problems as video conferencing. By examining the problems you have to introduce to make the real world not work you should have a good idea of what items need to be fully solved for a digital version.