Englewood, OH–based Telesuite (www.telesuite.com) hasn’t given up on this promising business tool, as I discovered on a recent trip to New York’s Waldorf=Astoria Hotel, where a public-access videoconferencing room was recently installed.

When you enter the Waldorf’s Telesuite conference room, you notice that it looks like any other except for the panoramic wall of blank screens that faces the door. The stylish conference table you sit at—but just one half of it—abuts the screens. When the system is active, the other half of the table, and your fellow conferees—wherever they happen to be—appear. In fact, the room you see on the screens looks exactly like the one you’re sitting in—it’s a mirror image, with the same decor and furniture, giving the illusion that you’re sitting at one big table.

Telesuite calls this a “virtual collaboration experience,” claiming that the system connects “people and ideas as if they were in the same room.”

Two systems are offered: the Telesuite Enterprise 400 series, which seats between eight and 20 people; and the Enterprise 200 series, which seats between four and eight. Depending on the size of the installation, a Telesuite costs between $10,000 to $20,000 a month to operate. Or you can rent a public unit for $595 per hour, although, obviously, you need to be conferring with a company that owns a Telesuite or with another public installation.

The technology itself comes pretty much off the shelf, using, for example, NEC rear projection 1060 projectors and standard video cameras, although Telesuite does integrate some of its own proprietary systems in addition to installing and supporting the systems.

Current clients include AOL (with eight units installed), 3M, the University of Arizona (which uses their Telesuite to conduct seminars) and Cigna. So far there are just 31 installations active, including the public one at the Waldorf, but the company hopes to have 100 public units operational in the next two years and reports that interest from corporations is brisk.

Surprisingly, perhaps, even some airlines (Delta and British Airways among them) have been looking at Telesuites for their airport lounges. Perhaps they hope that people will fly to their airport club rooms, hold a Telesuite conference and fly back.

Even Philadelphia-based travel management firm Rosenbluth Travel has installed one. With airline commissions down, maybe there’s more money to be made charging people to use a Telesuite than to fly them to a meeting.

Which brings up the question: Why would a hotel or airline want to sabotage business travel by making it easier not to travel? Just as technology was going to usher in the age of the paperless office, and instead helped increase paper usage, perhaps teleconferencing will have a similarly salutary effect on travel (or maybe not). Or perhaps it’s a case of if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them, in the same way that the print media rushed to join the online revolution. Whatever the case, to me it makes about as much sense as a Pepsi vending machine in Coca-Cola’s boardroom.

But Dan Piselli, the Waldorf’s director of information services, isn’t worried. “We’re proud to be one of the first” to have a Telesuite, he says. “It’s our objective to be at the forefront of new technology.”

The Telesuite, he explains, “Permits our customers who are having meetings here and who have Telesuites at their headquarters to communicate with their offices; it’s a value added to have the ability to do that on-site. We think it will attract people to come here rather than across the street.

Of course, using a Telesuite isn’t exactly like being there in person. You can’t pump the flesh. And direct eye contact is a bit tricky: you have to be looking directly into one of the cameras embedded in the screen, rather than into the eyes of the people on the other side, in order to establish eye contact. And you can’t pass notes or exchange meaningful glances or nudge someone under the table when a colleague makes a gaffe.

Although the next generation of Telesuites will not fix these shortcomings, it will be even more lifelike, promises Managing Director Charles Hall. Resolution, already perfectly acceptable, will increase 300 percent, he says, and whereas transmission is now partly analog, it will be completely digital in the next go-around. Now, if they’d just hand out frequent flyer miles (awarded per attendee, based on the distance between the two Telesuites perhaps?), then this thing would really fly.