Institute For The Future

Telepresence: it's the details?

In the first years after its founding in 1968, one of the biggest projects the Institute for the Future undertook was a study of online collaboration systems, and their impact on organizational behavior. The dream of the electronic system that's as good as a real meeting refuses to die; but unlike some futuristic technologies (I'm talking to you, personal jet pack), this one seems to be getting closer to reality, as this weekend's New York Times article on the latest high-end telepresence systems suggests.

 

High-end videoconferencing — the magical ability to be two places at once — has had a bumpy past, plagued by jerky gestures, out-of-sync lips and sound and cumbersome equipment. Few executives liked what they saw, including unflattering pictures of themselves, and most thought the business tool was not worth the price.

But now, thanks to new technology, videoconferencing is delivering on its promise as an alternative to traditional business travel. The high-definition TV images are sharp. Broadband fiber-optic cable has replaced tired telephone lines. And the equipment is often installed in studios that are handsome and appropriately corporate....

 

Two things are notable about this upsurge in telepresence.

First, the video, audio, and connections are all unquestionably getting better. But what's really interesting to me about these systems, and what makes them more successful, are the low-tech details that HP, Cisco and other companies use to fill in the gaps between video and reality.

 

Cisco’s virtual meeting room includes an IP (Internet Protocol) phone, three broadcast-quality cameras, three ultrasensitive mikes, three 60-inch plasma screens, a crescent-shaped table that seats six and soft back-lighting.

“The table is maple to complement faces,” said a Cisco spokeswoman, Jacqueline Pigliucci. The studios are painted in identical colors, to give the impression that the people on the screen are in the same room.

 

The couple people I've talked to who've used these systems say that the room design is what really makes the illusion work. Another is that the service on these high-end systems is very good: as one consultant quoted in the New York Times article says, "Walk in a Halo room, and everything is ready to run." (No one ever has to reboot a real conference room.) Of course, seamlessness comes at a cost: about $18,000 a month, to be precise.

In other words, it's not just that the technology is getting better in the conventional, specs-are-getting-more-impressive kind of way: the experience of using these systems is changing for the better because their designers are paying more attention to deployment and maintenance. Nothing breaks the illusion of seamlessness like having to reboot the computer the video conference was supposed to run on.

The second notable thing is who's really using these systems.

It might be just an artifact of a very small sample size, but the heaviest users I've heard of are groups who already have standing meetings, not people who are using these systems to substitute for first-time meetings with prospective clients. The technology isn't bringing together people who have never met before, but is strengthening an connection between colleagues. As Business Week reported earlier this year,

 

A typical user is private equity star Blackstone Group. Several times a week, CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman gathers senior managing partners around a polished conference table in the firm's New York headquarters on Park Avenue for a five-way video call.... Blackstone has 40 video rooms stationed around the world. One executive is so enthralled with the system that he keeps the conference connection running in his office all day long. "We're big proponents of videoconferencing because of the way it enhances the quality of meetings," says Harry D. Moseley, Blackstone's chief information officer.

Financial and consulting firms have been particularly avid purchasers. Deloitte & Touche USA is installing a dozen $250,000 video suites made by Polycom so that various business units can collaborate on outsourcing ideas or interview job candidates from India. AIC Ventures, a real estate investment company, has three video rooms: one in its home base of Austin, Tex., another in Dallas, and one in Chicago. They are used for everything from reviewing new Web page designs to celebrating the close of a big deal with a (now crystal-clear) ring of a tabletop gong.

 

This is a bit like the experience we've had at the Institute with Google Docs: that collaboration tool has its uses for asynchronous collaboration among geographically-dispersed authors, but the best uses come when authors are in the same room, and able to talk about the document in real time.

Despite this, at least one telepresence consulting company argues that this isn't the future: "effective inter-company business," they maintain, "will be propelling this industry forward in the coming years (remember where you heard it first!).... The future of telepresence will be about connecting with vendors, customers, and joint venture partners... to lower the shared costs of business relationships."