Because I am scrambling to get the final draft of Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration, and the Future of Global Business at the Speed of Light out the door this week I only have time for a quick update on my trip to New York City last Friday to check out HP Halo's new multi-point capabilities and the 4th Generation Teliris GlobalTable.

HP Halo Multi-point Demonstration - I spent the morning at the New York Offices of HP attending a demonstration of the Halo Collaboration Studio's recently announced multi-point capability. The demonstration connected Halo Studios in New York City, Palo Alto, Boeblingen, Germany, and Singapore. The audio and video quality was superb and the bandwidth was sufficient to allow the sharing of a DVD (of mountain biking unicyclists) in real-time on the collaboration screens of all locations with only a modest, almost inperceptible delay. We were also able to effectively share an oil-field exploration visualization program and the high-magnification camera for sharing documents or physical objects with the ability to see the most minute details such as circuit boards or apparel stitching between all the sites. There was also a German language interpreter present to demonstrate the interpretation capabilities that HP Halo has added with their partnership with Language Line.

I was able to see both HP Halo multi-point formats which I will characterize as:

Life-size - Limited to two participants per remote location. The same quality connected to multiple international locations that I have experienced in other Halo sessions connected to a single, domestic location. The quality was impressive but the functionality was limited to a four-site call and eight life-size particpants.

Almost Life-size - The ability to show up to four remote participants per location. This format, while far from being ideal, was much better than I had been expecting. To fit four participants on a single screen, Halo reduces their size and the effect is that all the remote particpants appear to be sitting somewhat farther away around a larger table. The quality of the video and audio was good enough to somewhat compensate for the reduction in the size of the remote particpants but the compromise was illustrative of the trade-offs that telepresence environment providers are forced to make to deliver the impossible.

I was most impressed with the Halo Studio's new Graphical User Interface (GUI) that I am still working on convincing the folks at HP to allow me to share an image of in our upcoming paper: Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration, and the Future of Global Business at the Speed of Light. The interface still simplifies the launching of Inter-company calls by starting with choice #1 of which organization would you like to connect to but has added a superb graphical reference for which remote locations and positions are live during a multi-point conference. The GUI allows you to add and drop studios during a call, displays which sites are connected, and provides the local time at each remote location. It is a weird experience to look up from the folks that you have been casually chatting with and realize that it is after 6:00 PM in Germany and after midnight in Singapore.

Teliris' 4th Generation GlobalTable - I was able to spend some time with Teliris CEO Marc Trachtenberg who was good enough to let me into the Teliris R&D lab to get a peak at the upcoming 4th Generation GlobalTable. I must admit that I was pleasantly suprised at the amount of practical R&D that Teliris is making in the field. I saw and we discussed a prototype camera that the company has been working on for a year and a half that addresses the issue of marrying multiple image streams (from a single or multiple remote locations) into a seamless picture across multiple displays or, eventually, over a completely seamless videowall that Teliris is also working on but probably won't be ready for prime-time until 2007. I also saw a Teliris designed flat-panel monitor array that significantly minimizes the distance between each display creating a more seamless image.

One existing feature that I had not seen before was a touch sensitive display and control panel that is mounted on the outside of GlobalTable installations that shows each room's (and other GlobalTable rooms) availability to better facilitate ad-hoc meetings. Having a conversation in the hallway of your New York office and want to see if you can pop into the GlobalTable to bring Bob in London into the discussion? Check the availability of both rooms instantly at the door and call Bob on his cell and ask him to drop in.

I was most impressed by a solution that Teliris is developing for the film and animation industry similar to DreamWorks' Virtual Studio Collaboration initiative (profiled in The DreamWorks Machine -Wired 13:06) One of the DreamWorks' virtual studio solutions eventually morphed into the Halo Collaboration Studio. The Teliris solution allows for storyboarding (what I refer to as a stand-up presentation capability) with true 60 frame-per-second high-definition video, interactive whiteboarding/storyboarding between locations, and the ability to edit video remotely between locations. Marc has promised me a rendering and/or photos for our upcoming publication.

As I left the Teliris offices my plans to visit some old friends for an early happy hour near Wall Street were dashed by a torrential downpour. The doorman at Teliris' building took pity on me and gave me a trashbag which I fashioned into a makeshift raincoat for the dash to the Grand Hyatt a couple of blocks away which seemed like a much better strategy to catch a cab. After 30 minutes or so waiting with little progress I had to improvise, adapt, and overcome and split a barely-covered PediCab to Penn Station with a lovely young woman from Philadelphia also trapped in the barely-moving Hyatt cab line. Got wet again at Penn Station, caught the Acela back to DC, and then drove back to the Silicon Plantation in Northern Virginia arriving home around 11:30 after an 18 hour day that started at 4:30AM. It was one of those trips where you realize that this whole telepresence thing just might have some legs to it...