| Within the next decade, nearly every major corporation will adopt a technology that few have heard of today. Telepresence, which takes videoconferencing to the next level, lets people interact as if they were in the same room. |
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| Cisco's TelePresence system |
Business is all about face-to-face relationships. Effective communication, whether between board members and corporate officers, salespeople and clients, or partners in joint ventures, requires the understanding and trust nourished by eye contact.
For decades, business has relied on commercial air travel to bring people together. Today the capacity of commercial aviation is seriously strained, with flight delays and baggage losses increasing, carriers declaring bankruptcy and fuel prices soaring. But business continues to globalize, and technologies like e-mail, Web conferencing and instant messaging have reset our expectations of turnaround times for decisions. Waiting days or weeks to huddle the team doesn’t cut it anymore.
Many people expected videoconferencing to solve these problems. But even with improvements such as higher resolution, bigger and better displays and IP networks replacing ISDN, the average usage of videoconferencing systems remains an abysmal 15 hours per month.
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Telepresence in a Nutshell
Telepresence environments duplicate in-person experience as closely as possible. They typically include:
• Life-size images of participants
• Fluid motion
• Accurate flesh tones
• Studio-quality video, lighting and acoustics
• The absence of visible technology
• True eye contact, or the approximation of eye contact in large-group settings
• Immersive and/or mirrored environments where participants feel as if they are in the same physical space
• Consistent quality between disparate locations
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Videoconferencing users complain that talking to the “camera-on-the-TV-set-on-the-dessert-cart” is uncomfortable and unnatural. Traditional videoconferencing is often the option of last resort, and even then it is almost always used internally, rather than for important meetings with customers or partners.
Telepresence dramatically improves the acceptance of visual collaboration by creating a more natural, productive and realistic experience. It works at any scale, from the desktop to the auditorium. Users feel they are “present” in the same physical space with others who might be thousands of miles away. Owners of telepresence group systems report usage between 60 and 275 hours per month – far higher than for traditional videoconferencing.
Solutions that business people are willing to use can cut down intracompany business travel, improve productivity and reduce wear and tear on road warriors. They also simplify collaboration with partners, vendors, investors and customers.
The ability to effectively conduct global inter-company business will make telepresence the “killer app” of the 21st century, with the potential for the exponential growth that characterized telephony, the Internet and other communication networks.
No Slam Dunk for Videoconferencing
Instantaneous, not limited by geography, and allowing communication between multiple parties in multiple locations, videoconferencing should be a slam dunk for business communications. Why is it used for only a small fraction of meetings, and rarely for meetings where relationships with partners, clients or prospects are formed, and where body language is important?
Traditional videoconferencing fails to replicate the experience of a face-to-face meeting. It offers tiny remote participants, jerky motion, poor audio, limited body language and no eye contact. In addition, the lighting is often poor, the colors off, the resolution bad, the format artificial, the controls complex and the collaborative tools weak. Trying to process the videoconferencing experience (TV set, camera, 8-inch-tall participants) along with the meeting itself (what participants are saying and doing) is fatiguing. As a result, productivity and return on investment suffer.
The ugly little secret about traditional videoconferencing is that many people don’t like the experience and prefer not to use it. For years the industry produced spreadsheets, graphs and interactive tools that promised return on investment based on travel avoided. Some companies estimated additional benefits from improved productivity. There was only one problem: Since no one liked videoconferencing very much, the systems weren't used nearly as often as providers projected.
Organizations where traditional videoconferencing systems are used more than 15 hours per month typically have mandates curtailing business travel and/or requiring videoconferencing. They also tend to follow “best practices” such as using dedicated high-bandwidth IP networks, and they keep the videoconferencing room-to-employee ratio low.
Human Factors First
About a decade ago, two resort developers in the Caribbean took a different approach. Herold Williams and David Allen wanted to give their guests an effective way to conduct business without having to leave their little slice of paradise. They decided to get the human factors right, and then develop the electronics around the human experience. They founded TeleSuite, the first commercially successful telepresence company, and developed a product that was used between 60 and 130 hours per month at each site -- four to seven times the usage of traditional videoconferencing.
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| HP's Halo system |
Flying in the face of the conventional videoconferencing wisdom – stack ’em high and sell ’em cheap – TeleSuite systems cost (and still cost) hundreds of thousands of dollars per room, with thousands more in monthly charges for network connectivity, support and maintenance.
Telepresence solutions from HP and Teliris can run more than $10,000 dollars per month, per location. Deploying a site to an international location with limited fiber optic capacity can run as high as $40,000 per month. By contrast, traditional videoconferencing desktop solutions range from under-$100 webcams between $3,000 and $5,000 dollars for dedicated desktop videoconferencing solutions.
Why does telepresence cost so much? Because the human brain is so smart! A full 30 percent of the brain’s cortex is devoted to vision, compared to 8 percent for touch and 3 percent for hearing. Optic nerves have a million fibers, auditory nerves about 30,000. Studies show that comprehension and retention are improved when you see information as well as hear it. Some psychologists believe that facial expressions, gestures, posture and eye contact account for between 70 and 80 percent of communication.
To trick the brain into accepting a videoconference as an in-person meeting, telepresence addresses human factors that traditional videoconferencing doesn’t address. Some of these human factors include:
Eye contact is chief among the body’s non-verbal cues. People with strong eye contact are perceived as more honest, attractive and successful, while “gaze-avoidant personalities” are rated less favorably. Eye gaze provides feedback, conversational regulation (turn taking), and access to others’ thoughts and emotions.
Traditional videoconferencing systems deliver poor eye contact because participants focus on the eyes of the remote participants and not on the camera. Telepresence providers use several methods to avoid this “parallax problem.” For example, Digital Video Enterprises mounts eye-level cameras behind a piece of silvered glass.
The room environment affects the quality of the videoconferencing experience. Overhead lighting casts harsh shadows that the camera magnifies; placing the videoconferencing system at the head of the conference table assures an unnatural meeting format. Telepresence providers use lighting that is optimized for video, and they position seats and equipment to make the meeting format natural. They also create identical environments everywhere on the network, so that participants seem to share the same physical space.
Acoustics can be improved with proper acoustical materials and sound insulation. Many telepresence providers use directional audio to make sound appear to come from remote participants.
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| MedPresence's MOR 400 in an operating room |
Concealed cameras make meetings more comfortable because human beings tend to behave differently in front of a camera (“the documentarian’s curse”). Some telepresence providers use small lenses concealed in an opening in the display; others hide the camera behind polarized glass.
Video quality depends on bandwidth, network quality, and the resolution of the video codec and camera. Telepresence providers recommend using networks with speeds of at least 1.5 to 4 Mbps, and those that provide private networks use bandwidths up to 45 Mbps. With dedicated private networks, providers can offer service levels that minimize jitter (jumpiness) and reduce latency (one-way delay) to below 250 milliseconds.
High resolution is important for visual realism. Being able to see perspiration or a slight grimace provides a window into the thoughts, truthfulness, motivation or comprehension level of remote participants. With more visual realism, the brain can stop focusing on the “medium” and concentrate on the “message.” Telepresence providers use current-generation video codecs, including many that are capable of high-definition images.
Audio quality is also maximized by private, dedicated networks. Telepresence providers can sync participants’ speech with lip movement and offer CD-quality audio with good echo cancellation in a “full duplex” configuration, so that both sides can speak simultaneously without losing any audio. This level of audio can’t be achieved in traditional multipoint videoconferences.
Ease of use is big with telepresence providers. While videoconferencing providers have simplified their controls, most telepresence providers have taken it a step further by providing concierge services for call setup, simplifying the use of collaborative tools, providing intuitive, touch-sensitive call setup menus, and positioning camera and display so that camera angles don’t need to be adjusted.
Life-size and properly proportioned images are made possible with large-format video walls and multiple monitors. By contrast, most traditional group videoconferencing systems display images of remote participants to a single 36- to 50-inch monitor.
Success Stories
Usage levels don’t tell the whole story of telepresence solutions. Even more important are the types of results that telepresence makes possible. Here are some projects that would never have been accomplished with traditional videoconferencing:
• Pearson used its GlobalTable to connect the talents and image library of its Dorling Kindersley subsidiary in London with the educational publishing expertise of Pearson Longman in New York City. The GlobalTable connection allowed the New York and London teams to meet for over a year, as often as twice a day, to collaborate on 140 titles including textbooks, teacher support materials and CD-ROMs in the fields of science, history, geography, art, design and technology.
• DreamWorks’ Virtual Studio Collaboration initiative lets the company conduct virtual storyboard sessions between various campuses and Aardman Animation, a joint venture partner, in Bristol, UK. DreamWorks credits the use of telepresence with its ability to ramp up from producing one animated feature a year to its current pace of two animated features a year, effectively doubling its revenue potential each year.
• UBS and Oppenheimer used TeleSuite’s publicly available virtual meeting center at the Waldorf-Astoria to meet with private investors at another publicly available TeleSuite at the Ritz-Carlton in Phoenix. The companies’ mutual fund and portfolio managers could present to, answer questions from and develop a rapport with the remote investors. Some of these events were catered, and one concluded with a virtual wine tasting.
• HP, utilizing its own Halo network, transferred a production line from its R&D facility in Corvallis, Oregon to a permanent home in Singapore. According to HP, the usual timeframe for such a move is 12 months, with multiple trips between locations.
The HP team responsible for the move estimated that its use of Halo enabled it to shave six months off the project and avoid 44 international trips.
About the Author
Howard S. Lichtman is the president and founder of the Human Productivity Lab, a consultancy specializing in telepresence and visual collaboration, personal and organizational productivity, and sales model optimization. This article is excerpted from his report “Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration and the Future of Global Business at the Speed of Light,” available at http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/. The report was sponsored by a group of telepresence providers. Howard can be reached at HSL@HumanProductivityLab.com.
