The applications of these technology include higher education, business, government, and personal activities - in brief, most forms of interpersonal communication among busy people at different locations or on different schedules.
We live in a changing world. The technologies we have examined are to varying extents already available, and most of them are incremental improvements over existing technologies - for example using digital video for distance education. The incremental nature of these changes makes it likely that they will happen, and the opportunities for distance education are very real.