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www.voip-news.comBy Cindy Waxer
Imagine sitting in a conference room in Eugene, Ore., and conducting a meeting with a sales manager in Tokyo, Japan, whose presence is so life-like you can actually make eye contact with him, notice beads of sweat forming on his brow and whisper into his ear as if he were seated next to you. The concept may sound plucked from the pages of a sci-fi thriller, but this Gattaca-like technology is slowly finding its way into high-end conference rooms around the world.
Commonly known as telepresence, this technology delivers real-time, face-to-face interactions around a virtual table through a combination of life-sized projections, fluid motion, spatial audio, high definition cameras and optimized networks. The result is a revolutionary visual conferencing environment that promises to help companies cut travel costs, boost productivity and wow participants.
Just ask Marc Trachtenberg, CEO and CTO of Teliris, a telepresence provider. “Telepresence has taken video, audio, directional sound, directional video and a host of proprietary capabilities and synthesized them into a unique environment that delivers a comfortable, natural, synthetic meeting space,” says Trachtenberg.
Better Than Being There
It’s an environment that today’s videoconferencing solutions have struggled to produce. Often difficult to deploy, and plagued with technical issues such as latency and jitter, many videoconferencing tools have fallen short of customer expectations.
David Hsieh would know. Hsieh is Cisco Systems' senior director of marketing for emerging technology. Cisco offers its own telepresence solution. “With videoconferencing, it’s just visually obvious that you’re having a technology-driven experience, whereas with telepresence, you look like yourself, all the way down to the crow’s feet around your eyes and the occasional grey hair on your head,” says Hsieh. And it’s precisely these visual cues that Hsieh says are critical to conferencing, “because more than 60 percent of communication is non-verbal.”
But for all its technical sophistication, telepresence is not for everyone. At costs ranging from $55,000 to upwards of $500,000 per system, today’s telepresence solutions are out of financial reach for many businesses. As for those companies that can afford it, serious consideration must be given to whether or not telepresence’s hefty price tag can truly offset travel expenses and communication costs.
“Telepresence is very expensive so organizations have to really think about whether or not they want this level of conferencing,” says Claire Schooley, a Forrester Research senior analyst. “Where I see it being adopted is with high-level executives who want to conduct meetings but who don’t want to travel as much.”
Technology Hurdles
Further complicating matters is the small pool of vendors businesses have to choose from. According to analysts, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Teliris, Polycom and TANDBERG count as today’s primary telepresence providers. Armed with deep pockets and significant brand power, each is taking steps to spread the word, from taking out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal to advertising on CNBC-TV.
“Right now there’s a lot of hype around the word telepresence,” says Carol Zelkin, executive director of the Interactive Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance (IMCCA). “Part of the reason why is that the players who are in it are large and have a lot of money to spend on getting their message out.”
At the moment though, no amount of money can tackle the biggest obstacle facing mainstream adoption of telepresence: interoperability, or the ability for these systems to work together. While some telepresence solutions are able to interact with Web conferencing tools, offerings from Cisco, HP and Teliris don’t work with each other. For example, Cisco telepresence participants are only able to interact with other Cisco telepresence users – a serious limitation in today’s global business environment.
“Interoperability today is the name of the game,” says Schooley. “You can’t have something that’s just a standalone unit. It really has to interoperate so that people can use whatever technology they want.”
What’s Next
Fortunately, steps are being taken towards greater interoperability. For example, in January, HP and TANDBERG announced an alliance to make their respective telepresence and video conferencing portfolios interoperable. As a result, businesspeople will soon be able to collaborate using everything from HP’s telepresence solution to TANDBERG’s conference room and desktop-based systems.
In the meantime, however, the race to market dominance is on as more and more enterprises take telepresence from sci-fi fiction to conference room reality.
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