Gotta love a corporate vice president who brings Jimmy Stewart and Harvey into the discussion.

“People thought Jimmy Stewart was crazy when he talked to his imaginary six-foot rabbit friend, Harvey,” says ABI Research (News - Alert) vice president Stan Schatt. “Now hundreds of senior executives are talking to virtual friends around the globe and no one is laughing anymore.”

Certainly not their employees to their faces, no.

“The telepresence illusion is so real that many execs forget the person they’re talking to is not really in the same room,” Schatt adds.

Ah yes, telepresence - video conferencing, but with the sensation that all participants are actually in the same room. The whole market, which includes telepresence equipment, network services and managed services, is forecast to grow from a 2007 level of not quite $126 million to nearly $2.5 billion in 2013.

Such realism is accomplished via high-definition, life-size video, tightly lip-synched directional audio, coordinated décor, and special technologies enabling eye-contact between participants. And it typically requires only a single mouse-click to start a session.

We don’t blame you for looking a bit askance at such claims. “It’s been a long time since any claim of a next-generation technology has held up against our twice-bitten mentality, hardened by years of IT hype,” writesRemember the Segway? We rest our case.

“But telepresence appears to be succeeding,” InformationWeek says, conceding that yes, it’s “the stuff of George Jetson and Buck Rogers,” but it is “filling a gap in the communication options available today.” See a real-life demo from Cisco (News - Alert) here. From the video demos we’ve seen it’s fairly impressive. Amazing? We’ll be amazed when teleportation is perfected.

Avoiding travel costs is one reason for telepresence. “With the economy in a downturn, it’s no surprise that companies have been slashing travel budgets. But at MetLife, officials say the focus is also on employees’ quality of life, keeping them home as much as possible. As a result, the insurance giant has recently made a big push into telepresence technology,” Computerworld reports.

A worthwhile setup costs an upwards of $330,000. That said, many telepresence operations are handled as managed services, ABI finds: “Less expensive ‘executive’ systems designed for one or two people mean that telepresence technology is now migrating down to middle managers, expanding the market.” InformationWeek.