Institute For The Future

Telepresence 2.0

We had a demo today of Cisco's new Telepresence videoconferencing solution today. I was in Cisco's office in New York with old NYCwireless co-conspirator Terry Schmidt who now works for Cisco. Mike Liebhold and Sean Ness from IFTF were on the other side at Cisco's San Jose headquarters.

 

As part of our investigations on the Future of Work for Tech Horizons in 2007, I've decided that its time to revisit telepresence. In this age of abundant bandwidth and computation for compression and encryption, we're seeing a whole new wave of products starting to target the enterprise teleconferencing market. How will they change the way we work, and the kinds of collaborative work that we can do at a distance?

 

I was immediately impressed by the setup - 3 huge high-definition screens assembled into a semicircular shape, and a complementary semi-circle conference table. It looked very much like this marketing photo from Cisco. The furniture, paint, and lighting are all designed for maximum visual clarity and continuity between the two locations. Each of the three sets of two seats has its own mic, and in the support legs of the table are power plugs and ethernet ports. Beneath the screens is a whiteboard, upon which local laptops can project screen images.

 

According to Terry and his colleagues at Cisco, the Telepresence product has been under development for three years, and only just came to market this Monday. At $350,000 per site (including installation). All I can is, "wow". The feel of continuity between the two locations is incredible. A couple of times people on the other end would slide something around or gesture towards us and I would have to remind myself that it wasnt going to fall off the table into the space in front of me. And even though we were having a conversation about the system's pros and cons and telepresence in general, I kept forgetting we were on a videoconference. Even switching my gaze over to Terry who was with me there was very little cognitive dissonance for me. We were 5 people, in two locations, eating up 16,000 watts of electrical power and 15 Mbps across a continent. But we were having a near-real life quality face to face interaction.

 

It's the details that make it magical - like the fact that as you move around the space, the mics track you and then recreate that movement of sound on the other side. Or when you walk towards the edge of the screen and the other people appear surprised when you don't re-appear on their side.

 

This experience got us talking about where this is headed. For now, videoconferencing like this will only be available for high-ed corporate use. As with HP's Halo system, the ROI is reduced international business travel. In fact, in many ways the project stemmed from an internal challenge by CEO John Chambers for Cisco to cut back on travel expenses by 20%. I think these kinds of technologies are really going to displace some kinds of routine business travel. I know recently that a lot of friends in my age cohort - lower-middle level managers in large multinationals - have been going to India recently to meet, greet, and launch offshoring projects. This might be the kind of formality that starts to be replaced by broad adoption of this kind of teleconferencing. Interactions where a moderate, not high, level of trust and familiarity is required to build and maintain a functioning team.

 

There's also the question of this kind of technology reaching the home, especially given Cisco's position inside the cable infrastructure through their acquisition of Scientific Atlanta, manufacturer of set-top boxes. Given the compression levels of about 1000:1 that Cisco can achieve now, its conceivable that this product could be built into home devices soon. Cisco claims 5 years to start getting into homes, it seems that this might be a more demanding challenge. But it could really be disruptive to the way we use technology, and organize practices in the home.

 

We'll be looking at other emerging telepresence platforms this year, and integrating these insights into our research deliverables going forward. We'll post updates here.

 

I have a feeling this is going to be an important disruptor in business communications and global mobility.

 

I suspect Mike and Sean will want to add to this too.