Hewlett-Packard has introduced this week, at the DEMOfall 09 conference in San Diego, a yourger cousin of Halo, branded as SkyRoom. This launching reflects how consumer video chat services are getting ever closer to the quality of enterprise video conferencing services.

SkyRoom offers affordable video conferencing with screen-sharing for $149 (oops, only for Windows). This software allows up to four individuals to connect face-to-face in a secure, high definition video coference right from their workspaces. Also it accommodates rich media sharing.

It updates images as much as four times a second. You need to have a minimum of 2.5 GHz dual core processor, 2 GB of ram, and be connected to a network running at 1 Mbps or fas

It will  be included for free on all HP workstations sold, starting Oct. 1. Obviously it won't replace the high-end video conference rooms that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.