Will rapid technological development enable video-conferencing, or 'telepresencing', to offer a cheap, green alternative to business travel? Bob Papworth prepares for 'total immersion'
Psst! Wanna buy some 'immersive and room telepresence solutions and multipoint infrastructure, providing end-to-end support for enhanced telepresence quality'?
Actually, without knowing it, you might well want to. Impenetrable though that techno-twaddle might be, it actually translates as 'the very latest in video-conferencing', and videoconferencing (or 'VC' as we must now learn to call it) has suddenly become the hot topic of the moment. Well, not that suddenly, really. VC was first demonstrated at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Expensive and, quite frankly, rubbish.
Expectations were, as they say, great. Just as television was supposed to sound the death-knell for magazines and newspapers, and video was going to kill the radio star, so VC was all set to stop the travel industry in its tracks. It didn't, of course, partly because the travel industry successfully promoted the notion that there is no substitute for the face to face meeting, but mostly because VC was so utterly awful.
As US multimedia communications consultant Dr S Ann Earon points out in a recent white paper: "When video-conferencing was first commercially introduced in the early 1980s, it was compared to a television and telephone. Users thought, like a television, when one buys a VC system it does not need to be replaced for at least 15 years, and when calls are made they go through 99.9 per cent of the time, like telephone calls.
"In reality, video-conferencing should have been compared to a PC and cell phone. It needs software updates, it may need to be rebooted, and calls do not always go through and stay up until the user hangs up.
"The expectation levels in the minds of the users were poorly set, and never reset. As a result, video-conferencing systems are often sitting in a corner collecting dust because users have not been satisfied with their performance."
In part, at least, that now looks set to change. Having watched with mounting horror as the global economy headed down the pan, corporates last year started looking around for something to slash.
The choice between 'wrists' and 'travel budgets' was always going to be a close one, so travel management companies decided to get their retaliation in first, and started going all Churchillian, asking whether your journey was really necessary, and talking about VC as "an integral part of the service mix".
Having cunningly steered clients away from the VC concept in the first place, travel management companies are now cunningly steering them back - for a fee, obviously.
The VC providers have also changed tack. Rather than ringing travel's death-knell, they are now advocating the use of VC as part of, rather than a substitute for, a travel programme.
Speaking at an Institute of Travel Management forum in London earlier this year, Cathy Ham, general manager, global portfolio and marketing for BT Conferencing, argued exactly that point. In BT's "communication hierarchy", non-urgent, everyday communication is done by post, email or instant messaging, or by phone. As the messages become more important, and documents need to be exchanged, audio- and web-conferences come into their own.
Ham says the next step up, "interim" meetings at which discussions and decisions are required, is where VC should come in. Only then, when there are dotted lines to sign on, hands to shake, and backs to slap, does travel come into the equation.
So, the financial imperative has spurred corporates to look for travel alternatives; anxious not to be left out, travel management companies and VC providers have re-worded their sales pitches. Much more importantly, VC itself has changed beyond all recognition. Welcome to the wonderful world of telepresencing.
Based on the old theatrical 'suspension of disbelief' concept whereby audiences become so absorbed their senses are tricked into believing something is happening when, in reality, it isn't, telepresencing uses 'total immersion' to make the conference as 'real' as possible.
In essence, a telepresence suite looks like half a boardroom, complete with half a boardroom table. The other side of the table - and the people seated at it - appears, life-sized, on a screen or series of screens. The suites are decorated similarly, directional sound systems make sure the right voice comes from the right speaker, and the high-definition picture quality is sufficiently good to fool most of the senses, most of the time.
Like VC, it's not a particularly new idea. The first commercially-successful telepresence company, Teleport, was founded in 1993 to enable family members across the US to 'interact' without having to worry about the cost of air tickets every Thanksgiving.
Hilton Hotels thought this was a great idea and began installing suites, but lack of uptake made it commercially unviable and the venture was canned. Until, that is, earlier this decade, when a number of companies revisited the whole telepresence concept. Hewlett- Packard launched its Halo-branded product in December 2005. Cisco followed with its TelePresence Meetings offerings a year later.
A host of competitors subsequently started touting their telepresence wares.
Texas-based LifeSize Communications claims to be "the global leader in high definition video communications", while Polycom reckons it is "the global leader in telepresence, video and voice communications solutions". Oslobased Tandberg insists it is the "leading global provider of telepresence, video-conferencing and mobile video solutions", flying in the face of Teliris' assertion that it is "the leading provider of immersive telepresence solutions".
Healthy though all this competition might have been, telepresencing didn't come cheap. Top-of-the-range systems ran out at many hundreds of thousands of dollars, affordable only to major corporations.
And then, in October last year, it was announced that a Cisco TelePresence facility had been installed in 51 Buckingham Gate, Taj Suites & Residences in London.
The installation is part of a collaborative venture between Cisco and Taj's Tata Group parent, and there are similar facilities in Taj properties in Mumbai, Bangalore and Boston already, with 100 more to come - including at The Pierre in New York. Cisco has also opened suites in Confederation of India Industry (CII) offi ces in Bangalore, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai, and has its own in Santa Clara, California.
The significance is that these are open to all and sundry, at rental costs of between US$299 and US$899 per hour. Depending on the size of the room, they can seat up to 18 telepresence participants.
Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco's Emerging Technologies Group says: "Public Cisco TelePresence makes the immersive, real-time Cisco TelePresence experience available to a much broader audience, fundamentally changing how businesses and individuals can collaborate globally without travelling long distances.
"With the introduction of a pay-per-use model, we're able to increase our customers' ability to access Cisco TelePresence without the upfront capital investment." Or, to put it another way, you can rent them. Communications consultant Dr S Ann Earon is clearly happy.
"Telepresence is what videoconferencing was meant to be," she says. "Reliable, highly interactive and easy to operate, resulting in a natural meeting with transparent technology and an emphasis on human factors.
"Because organisations need to make choices regarding how to leverage their global resources without undue risk, because the cost of travel and its inconvenience is escalating, and because there is greater interest and emphasis on environmental issues, telepresence is being viewed as a critical technology for use by organisations globally." Earon's conclusion? "Telepresence works." Now, that's the type of techno-twaddle we can all understand.