Telepresence - Wave of the Past?
May 30th, 2007 (12:00pm) Mike Gunderloy 10 Comments
Telepresence World is next week. Telepresence, for those who haven’t experienced it, refers to videoconferencing that renders the “remote participants life-size, with fluid motion, accurate flesh-tones and flawless audio.” This isn’t the rinky-dink stuff that you do with a webcam and a copy of your favorite instant messenger application, but the stuff that’s going on at Fortune 1000 corporations with rooms full of fancy hardware installed on the other side of imposing solid-wood conference tables.
Cisco is making a major push in this area, and there are a number of well-funded smaller companies with hardware for sale today. Setting up telepresence-connected meeting rooms isn’t the stuff of science fiction these days, but simply a matter of finding the appropriate budget, and that budget is getting less astronomical all the time.
You’d think this stuff, offering another means of rich communication across long distances, would be a natural for web workers. And yet, I wonder.
When I look around at the way that web workers deal with communications, it seems to me that we’re more often focused on efficiency of information exchange than on the immersiveness of the process itself. In our world, the significant factor has been the rise of richly-interlinked, easily-searchable, folksonomy-enabled tools that let us quickly navigate the vast sea of information we need to do our jobs. We don’t use Google or Basecamp or del.icio.us or Adium because they look good; we use them because they excel at delivering the nuggets of information that we need, when we need them.
Telepresence, by contrast, comes from the other side of the busyness vs. burst cultural divide. If you’re communicating with your boss by old-style instant-message conference, you likely have the spare bandwidth to also be getting some “real work” done, especially because those further up the corporate hierarchy tend to be those with the weakest typing skills. In a telepresence meeting, by contrast, it’s blindingly obvious if you’re not paying attention. Indeed, many of the telepresence vendors also tie in to more generalized presence solutions, billed as helping keep track of partners and colleagues so that you can launch conferences and, perhaps not incidentally, know when they’re actually working.
It seems to me that many telepresence efforts are fundamentally conservative. They’re an attempt to use a new medium (the Internet) to preserve an old pattern (the face-to-face meeting), rather than understanding the strengths of the new medium. While there are certainly good uses for this technology, from contract negotiations to educational seminars, in general it doesn’t offer a lot to the web worker who is already out on the cutting edge of multiple methods of connectivity. The good news is that by the time your corporate overlords get around to trying to control everything by telepresence, it will probably be too late.
10 Comments Post your own comment
JamesC says: May 30th, 2007 12:24pm
I noticed while watching 24 this year that they had a Cisco “Telepresence Suite” in their fictional White House. Maybe the older generation are impressed and feel it useful, I really couldn’t see the point.
Ron Wilson says: May 30th, 2007 1:20pm
Mike,
As I was reading I had a picture in my mind of King Lear raging against the storm. Ok, maybe “raging” is a little bit of hyperbole. Call it swimming against the tide.
Not that I don’t sympathize. As a numbers geek there have been plenty of times when I wished people would just go away so I could get some real work done.
The reality, however, is that humans are social animals. We can’t go long without feeling the need to interact with other humans, and technology, no matter how efficient at information gathering and processing, is no substitute. Important, yes, but different.
Marshall says: May 30th, 2007 6:55pm
I have been working in Telepresence for 5 years now, partially because it is a cool experience. When done well, it really does help faciliate human interaction; there are people on other continents that I feel I know pretty well but have never physically met. I would place it on the “burst” side of the work divide, as it really facilitates spontaneous meetings with distant participants. I don’t think it is really going to change corporate cultures that much, though.
BTW, the original business plan, 10 years ago, was for “TeleDining,” with Suites being placed in Hotel restaurants. This was actually done back in the 1995-96 time frame.
Larry Cannell says: May 31st, 2007 5:14am
Mike, you nailed it. This is video conferencing trying to make another comeback. While I believe there are scenarios where this makes sense, these are few and far between.
is something I wrote about conferencing eight years ago. Much of it still holds true today.
Larry Cannell says: May 31st, 2007 5:16am
Hereis something I wrote about conferencing eight years ago. Much of it still holds true today.
Doug K says: May 31st, 2007 3:17pm
most of business is politics. Political negotiations are best accomplished face-to-face, as there are many channels of information that cannot be captured in text. This is the market for telepresence, not tech worker bees.
Sipcat VoIP Blog » Blog Archive » Telepresence or videoconferencing? says: June 4th, 2007 12:49am
[...] Via: Web Worker Daily [...]
Stu Downes : Collaboration with surfaces says: June 5th, 2007 5:36am
[...] rather than a niche product: “However I can’t help but think that Surface is a bit like Telepresence, a technology that will be reserved for a very small number of [...]
larry ferrarri says: July 31st, 2007 12:22pm
Seems like you all just don’t understand business.
Take outsourcing, for example.
Indiatek has a 2 year contract with Z trade (a US Company) to develop anything tech.
Indiatek is required to have 1 person in the US for every 4 in India.
To move projects along, Ztrade sends people from the US to India, incurring 52 hours of travel time for essentially 2 days (max) of meetings. IndiaTek cannot send people as they cnnot get temporary visa’s. If they do, there is a 90 day delay.
Indiatek, in their infinite wisdom, puts in Telepresence from India to Z trade.
They now have overcome alot of issues in their projects for both companies,
And guess what? They created “stickiness” with their customer. so when
Banglagoretek comes in to underbid them, Z trade says”will you install a TP system so we can communicate effectively?
Before you ALL comment on telepresence perhaps you should get a demo.
Only UNIMPORTANT PAWNS in business frown upon this and cannot realize its importance.
On-Premise Videoconferencing: Not for Web Workers? « Web Worker Daily says: October 15th, 2007 5:45am
[...] Worker Daily’s Mike Gunderloy has questioned telepresence for web workers, saying “it doesn’t offer a lot to the web worker who is already out on the cutting [...]