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Until you can flick your "head" in the direction of someone who just spoke outside of your field of vision, these will continue to feel like you're at a meeting in a neck brace.

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A fisheye lens mounted on the ipad might help there. It's just about high enough res that you might get away with rectifying the image to get rid of the distortion at the human end.

yes, exactly. but then the remote audience will miss the cue that you are turning your gaze - so perhaps it can do both: turn on it's axis and rotate in the already transferring fisheye stream.

It would be fun to hook up a head mounted display, so you just turn your head and the robot turns.

or just use the accelerometer of the ipad. turn yourself and and the ipad to look around the room. Would feel like you were moving a virtual window around. I doubt the robot can react fast enough for it to feel natural though.

Yep, the key is speed, hence why I said "flick". Next time you're in a meeting keep track of how many times you look at someone and back in less than a second.

But we have to go through this step before we can advance the technology, so I'm all for these style of robots.

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