High-tech interaction via Cisco TelePresence

Word had it that at the first public screenings of Auguste and Louis Lumiere’s films in Paris in the late 1800s, a scene showing a train arriving at a station had audiences screaming and scampering to different directions, believing that it would leap out of the screen and plow right into the crowd.

The image was so real, it broke down people’s notion of reality and unreality.

In 1969, computer scientists and graduate students at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City experimented on a four-node hooked by a 50 Kbps circuit. The UCLA guys reportedly typed an "L" and all four computers on four locations saw an "L" on their screens. They proceeded to type an "O," or a "G," and "I" and an "N." By the time the word "LOGIN" was completed, the system crashed.

But it was the beginning of the Internet era and computer-mediated communication.

Technology has swept the world off its feet many times over since the invention of moving images and computer networks but few had so altered our way of life as the Lumiere brothers’ cinematograph and the Internet.

In Singapore the other week, and in many parts of the world as well, IT journalists gathered at an obscure conference room for the launch of a new videoconferencing technology that promises to further shake up our reality constructs.

Videoconferencing itself is not new but in this latest technology package of Cisco Systems, dubbed the Cisco TelePresence, an onscreen reality is created such that the experience feels like a person is sitting in the same room with you, though he or she may actually be halfway around the world.

For this innovative creation, Cisco executives even refuse to call it a next-generation videoconferencing solution.

"It’s not about technology, it is about being connected," says Chuck Trent, vice president of Vendor Management Office in a briefing before the start of the TelePresence session. "The conversation is right there on the conference table. There is no need to zoom in or out."

There were no grainy images either nor complicated set-ups, he says. What one gets is a live person interacting and arguing with you on a plasma screen, just like in a face-to-face meeting.

The only thing you couldn’t do with it, he warns, is shake hands with the person after the meeting or exchange business cards as the norm in most business meetings.

Being here, being there

It is not in the galaxy far, far away nor in the holodecks aboard the Starship Enterprise; the room is somewhere on the upper floors of the Capital Tower in Singapore where the Asia-Pacific headquarters of Cisco Systems is located.

Three journalists and a Cisco marketing executive from Manila sit in between K.C. Soh, senior manager for advanced technologies for the Asia-Pacific, on one side of the conference table.

On the other side were Guido Jouret, chief technology officer of Cisco’s Emerging Markets Technology Group, three Taiwanese journalists and a Cisco marketing executive also from Taiwan.

It could have easily been an intimate press conference had it not been for the fact that Jouret and the Taiwanese team are not in the same room as Soh and the Manila journalists. They are in Hong Kong; their life-size presence merely beamed on three plasma screens at the conference room of the Singapore office where Soh’s team is.

"It’s so real, you can actually read the time on the watch of the person you are talking to," Trent earlier said.

Yes, the image is so crisp, you can see every gesture, every movement of the muscle or the eye of the people you are talking to. You can even read the notes they are scribbling on their notebooks.

With TelePresence, Jouret says, "You are as you are. We don’t scale people down. There’s no remote control or zoom."

And because the technology utilizes wideband spatial audio, the sound emanates from that corner of the room where the person is. Move across the room while talking and the sound moves with you.

As an enterprise video product, it supports 1080p video quality, that is said to be six times better than standard television and more than twice better than HDTV.

This, says Jouret, creates an illusion of presence.

More than a technology milestone, Cisco TelePresence is expected to change business models and corporate communication.

For one, as TelePresence provides an in-person experience, it is expected to cut travel time by 20 percent and reduce expenses of traveling executives by $100 million.

"Give me a choice between sitting in a conference session on TelePresence at 2 a.m. on a Sunday and a real meeting in Europe or the US on a normal workday, I’ll gladly choose the 2 a.m. meeting," says Gary Coman, Asia-Pacific director for product management.

While the 2 a.m. meeting sounds like a crazy idea, actual travel to Europe or US is much more time-consuming and expensive. There are flights and hotels to book, airport transfers, visas and other requirements to attend to, plus the hassle of jet lag, among others.

Cisco affirms that its end-goal is to improve productivity. Why travel to another side of the world when you can meet right here in this room and yet be there, too?

The network is the platform

Andre Smit, Cisco Systems’ senior director for technical operations in the Asia-Pacific, admits that it’s the most exciting thing Cisco has done in years.

Cisco, the worldwide leader in networking, has always been known for technology that only geeks understand. However, if you think of Flickr, Skype, YouTube, Cyworld and MySpace, all of these collaborative network spaces are really powered by Cisco technology.

In the 1990s, he says, everything was about getting connected. But today, the human network connects people and consumer data centers. "Everything has moved to IP (Internet Protocol)," says Smit. "We believe that the network platform should enable life experiences."

These experiences may include gaming, blogs, TV, social networking or music over the IP network.

TelePresence also rides on the same high-speed network that most enterprises already have. So, deployment is easy; the infrastructure and security are already there.

However, as of now, it is a complete end-to-end solution that only Cisco provides, having been developed by Cisco entirely in-house.

The standard package, called the Cisco TelePresence 3000, which was used in the Singapore launch, consists of a three-panel, 65-inch plasma screen system, lighting, microphones, Ethernet and power ports, multiple ultra high-definition codecs and cameras and a professional-quality table that seats six people on each side.

A smaller version, the Cisco TelePresence 1000, comes with a single-panel plasma screen system and can be installed as a free-standing unit, particularly in executive offices and small conference rooms.

Both systems come with the Cisco TelePresence manager that controls the scheduling, management, reporting and full call detail recording.

"This only demonstrates the power of the network," says Coman.

It doesn’t come cheap though. The set-up costs roughly $300,000 at the moment. However, as with most technologies, mass adoption usually drives down cost. Cisco itself gives assurance that the payback period for the investment is only a little over nine months, depending on how much a company spends on executive travel and how geographically dispersed its teams are.

Perhaps, the greatest beneficiary of this technology is Cisco itself. By the end of July next year, 110 systems would have been deployed in Cisco offices worldwide. There are currently three now in the Asia-Pacific – Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Who knows, Trent says, if in the near future, the technology could even be evolved for home use.

"There is nothing like seeing your granddaughter’s first tooth or when your 17-year-old grandson’s hair is turning green from red, even if you are living on the other side of the world," he says.