Macleans - No Travel Required: Halo's Teleconferencing System Makes The Other Stuff Look Like Walkie-Talkies
Macleans covered the HP Halo Collaboration Studio in a rather short piece that can be found in its entirety Here. While there wasn't a whole lot of fresh meat there were a couple of new revelations:
Here are some excerpts with my usual emphasis:
A few years ago, DreamWorks Animation co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, determined to outrun his archrival, Pixar, ramped up production of his studio's releases to the Herculean pace of two a year -- unprecedented in toon town. Over the Hedge hits theatres May 19, hot on the tail of Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a collaboration with Britain's Aardman Animations. To keep the beat -- and maintain control over his decentralized design teams -- Katzenberg, a notorious workhorse, realized he needed to be in too many places at once.In 2002, his engineers came up with next-generation teleconferencing technology that lets him do just that. Their virtual boardrooms allow Katzenberg to confer with animators in Bristol, Redwood City, Calif., or beyond, and remotely tweak frames from a film, all without leaving his Glendale, Calif., hub. The studio-quality sound system can pick up a half-whispered grunt, and the picture is vivid enough to zero in on the bad shading of an ogre's swollen green belly.
Now Hewlett-Packard -- which got involved with the conferencing system in 2003 -- is giving the virtual boardroom wide release under the trade name Halo (rumour has it Steven Spielberg wants one for his place in the Hamptons). When seated in two identical rooms, participants look across at three plasma screens projecting high-quality, life-size images of the other locale, creating the illusion that conferees are sitting around a common boardroom table. (This summer, HP will unveil a system allowing more than two locations to connect at the same time.) A monitor mounted above the screens allows people at both ends to see the same file or image.
...HP says Halo saved them US$1 million when they set up their latest production line, in Singapore. "We were able to communicate much faster, and we were able to bring in more experts to the project than we could ever have flown in," says Camp. DreamWorks Animation will have 10 rooms running by the summer. PepsiCo has Halo rooms in its New York City, Chicago and Dallas offices. Novartis has signed on, too. With clients like these, HP is convinced Halo will become the tool of choice for Fortune 500 companies. Does your CEO need one? Probably not. Does she want one? You bet.
