The inspiration for this month’s column came from two weeks of business travel, where it seemed that every flight I was scheduled to take was either delayed or cancelled, sometimes both. Was it really “weather in Chicago,” or merely the fact that United had three partially filled flights headed there and cancelled the first two, yielding a single full (and thus profitable) plane? In a universe where you have no control, it’s easy to become a conspiracy theorist. The one upside was discovering that Midwest Airlines serves fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies on flights after 10 a.m. Unfortunately, I was on a 7:45 a.m. flight.
In the history of business and technology, there’s a recurring theme of solutions to the problem of “being there” (and the attendant technological failures). One hundred years ago, if you wanted to meet someone face-to-face, you walked, pedaled a bicycle, rode a horse or took a train. Now, you drive a car or hop on a plane. The distance between coasts and continents has shrunk dramatically. We think nothing of flying across the country or an ocean to close an important deal though a personal presence.
Why do we make such efforts to see someone in person? Because millions of years of evolution have hard-wired our primate brains for face-to-face interaction. Technologies like the telephone and email simply don’t let us use a highly refined portion of our brains. Subtleties that are lost in an email are conveyed by tone of voice on the telephone. Likewise, critical nonverbal cues are lost over the phone. Is the other person paying attention? Responding positively? Sometimes, the only way to tell they aren’t totally bored is to be in the same room.
The “same room,” however, turns out to be a somewhat-malleable concept. Cisco Systems, well known makers of boxes (called routers) that tie the Internet together, has dramatically changed what it means to be in the same room with someone through the application of technology. They call it “Cisco TelePresence” (since you can’t trademark a common descriptive word like telepresence, which means “the ability to perform a task remotely”). A lesser-known fact: Cisco partnered with industrial design firm Speck Designs (see the case study at www.speckdesign.com) to create this product.
The best way to see what Cisco has produced is to visit www.cisco.com and watch the video (look for “TelePresence” under “Solutions” in the navigation menu). But for those of you reading this column away from a computer, let me describe the basic setup. When using TelePresence, you walk into a room that appears to be a conference room seating 12, six on each side. In the center of the room, at about head-height, are three camera lenses. When the room is full, the impression is that of 12 people sitting around the table.
The trick, however, is that only half of the room (and table) exist where you are. The other half of the room is created using three giant plasma display screens. Those screens are displaying a half-room exactly like the one you are standing in (except that half-room is down the hall or around the world). Like a magic trick, the secret lies in making both sides of the scene look the same, so your brain assumes the local and remote half-rooms are joined. This requires attention to details, like making the size of the people “across” the table the same as if they were actually there. Pictures of this $300,000 setup look cool, and those who’ve actually sat in one say the experience is much better than the pictures might lead you to believe (use Google Images to search for cisco telepresence).
As Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and this magic show requires a lot of technology. First, the display must have sufficient resolution to avoid conscious notice, at least once you’re immersed in a conversation with the people across the table. The Cisco system uses 65-inch plasma display screens with 1,080 lines of vertical resolution (1080p, for those of you with display fetishes) to provide enough detail. For comparison, a standard TV set provides less than half that resolution. The high-resolution video cameras used to transmit the images are specially engineered for this application (so participants are correctly sized and not distorted by lens effects).
Second, even if things look right, having sound coming from a single speaker (like a conference call) would immediately break the suspension of disbelief. So, the room has microphones discreetly placed in the right spots, and a theater-style sound system that reproduces directionally-accurate sound on the other end. Think the THX demonstration at the start of some movies, where the sounds move around the theater.
Last, it takes a fair amount of reliable, continuous bandwidth to transmit the sound and image data from one location to another. You have three high-resolution video streams plus audio to contend with. The secret is the “codec” (coder-decoder) technology used to compress the data stream for transmission. Moreover, each video stream has a dedicated codec (unlike some competing systems, which use a single codec for multiple video streams). Amazingly, they reduce the bandwidth requirement to approximately 10 megabits per second. For comparison, your cable or DSL line can deliver about half that amount on a good day.
Of course, $300K is a lot of money to plunk down (and the bandwidth costs are on top of that). But it’s still cheaper than a similar system from Hewlett-Packard called “Halo,” which costs $500K, plus $18K for monthly maintenance.
At the other end of the spectrum, non-immersive, face-to-face experiences are cheap. All you need is a $100 Web camera like the Logitech QuickCam Fusion or the Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000, coupled with Skype (free) and a broadband Internet connection with reasonable upstream capabilities.
Want to stand out as client-centered and tech-savvy? Send new customers a Web cam and instructions on how to set it up and connect to their account representative. Sure, they’ll use it to talk to their grandkids as well as your sales or support personnel, but they’ll be thinking of you every time they do. You may still need to hop on a plane to close the deal, but smart businesses will follow the sale with simple (and cheap) face-to-face interaction from their desktops.
