Both the Wall Street Journal and Internet Telephony Magazine covered telepresence this week. The Wall Street Journal article was an especially important one with some important new industry relelations which ran on page B1 and can be found in its entirety Here.
Excerpts and Emphasis Mine.

Better Virtual Meetings-With Pricey Cameras, Plasma Screens, 'Telepresence' Replaces Video-Conferencing
By William M. Bulkeley

A new generation of high-end video-conference systems is facilitating virtual meetings that users say are almost like being there -- especially compared with conventional systems plagued by jerky video and speech that isn't synchronized with lip movements.

The high-end systems with broadcast-quality cameras and a row of 50-inch plasma screens cost as much as $1 million for a two-location system ($500,000 more for each additional one), plus as much as $18,000 a month for high-speed phone lines. That is as much as 50 times the cost of older, less sophisticated systems.

New 'telepresence' videoconferencing rooms made by Teliris feature rows of plasma television screens, as well as broadcast-quality cameras

Sir Peter Walters persuaded fellow directors at GlaxoSmithKline PLC., to install equipment made by Teliris Inc., in 2002 after terrorist threats disrupted air travel between London and Philadelphia. Sir Peter, the retired chairman of BP PLC, says when he was first shown the system by Martyn Lewis, a former BBC news anchor who is chairman of Teliris, "I was absolutely astonished, having seen only ordinary video-conferencing before." Teliris is a closely held firm with dual headquarters in New York and London.

Sir Peter says when he first sat down in a videoconference room at investment bank Lazard Ltd. in London and talked to people in a similar room in New York, "they were almost life-size. It was perfect vision, perfect voice. You almost wanted to reach out and shake their hands." He says Glaxo found the systems so useful, it has installed systems in 15 locations. They are used by scientists, researchers and top executives for collaboration. Other customers for Teliris's $150,000 rooms include Finnish cellphone giant Nokia Corp. and Whitehouse Station, N.J., drug maker Merck & Co.

The so-called telepresence market is now attracting some major players. In December, Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., began selling a system called Halo, with each outfitted room now priced at $425,000. The system was jointly developed with DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., the Glendale, Calif., cartoon maker, which wanted a way to links teams of animators in northern and southern California. H-P has installed 63 systems and is adding 10 a month; customers include PepsiCo Inc., Purchase, N.Y., and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif. Cisco Corp. Chairman John Chambers announced in the spring that the giant San Jose, Calif., networking company plans to enter the market this year....

...Telepresence makers and users say the experience is so much better in the high-end rooms that employees clamor to reserve space. Ken Crangle, general manager of H-P's Halo division, says H-P already had many videoconference rooms installed, but their poor quality meant they averaged only seven hours of use a month. Halo rooms average 160 hours of use a month. He says once the systems are installed for executives and directors, other managers quickly move to book the rooms at other times. "Then you get the peasants-with-pitchforks problem," when lower level employees get upset about being bumped out of a room by the CEO, Mark Hurd, Mr. Crangle says...

HP Halo Collaboration Studio in a Multi-point Call

...Telepresence engineers employ a variety of techniques for making virtual meetings more lifelike. Rather than having a single large monitor at one end of a conference room, they place a row of four to six 50-inch plasma screens along one side of a room, with live participants on the other side of the room along a conference table. In some systems, high-quality videocameras are placed just above the screens. Polycom says it has achieved a more-lifelike effect by placing cameras behind the screens, so live participants are shown staring directly into the eyes of the remote person...

HSL's Thoughts and Analysis

The Wall Street Journal piece echoes the market leading work of the Lab on the emerging telepresence industry including our dozens of articles, published papers, videos, webcasts, and interviews with industry participants. The article provides a concise overview of the revolution that is the emerging telepresence conferencing industry and provides some fascinating revelations including:

* Confirmation that Tandberg will be entering the space in January (I have been hearing this rumored for months)
* HP now has 63 rooms operational, is adding 10 per month, and they are averaging 160 hours per month
* Teliris is now up to 15 sites at GlaxoSmithKline and has added Nokia and Merck as customers

I think this telepresence thing is going to be big...

Beam Me Up, Polycom - The Internet Telephony Magazine Article
the complete article can be found Here. Excerpts and emphasis mine.

The Back of HSL's Rapidly Balding Melon in a Polycom RPX Suite

In today's collaborative, presence-based business environment, most large distributed enterprises have, by now, either implemented some sort of video conferencing facility or are at the very least exploring their options. It can certainly be useful to see colleagues in a small box on your PC monitor and speak to him through your desktop phone. Many would agree it can make a conversation more productive, especially when you are able to share documents at the same time.

But, image being in a specially designed room, talking to the same colleague, and almost forgetting they are miles away. Imagine them as life-size images sitting at your table, with no microphone or camera in sight. Or imagine the same thing with two groups of colleagues, or three, or four ... you get the point...

...This is the ultimate enterprise play, for sitting in the RPX 210 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan, one gets the sense of sitting next to William Shatner on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, complete with its life-size screen. In fact, about the only thing the RPX can't do with its real world collaborative setting is beam you from New York to Virginia. But it's the next best thing...

Happy Friday!

Here are a couple of clips sent to me from my honorary little sister Kristi whose beautiful smile graces the Lab's website. Her hubby, Jason, is a naval aviator flying E-2s off the USS Enterprise in the gulf with the VAW-123 Screwtops. The guy rocking out who kicks off the second video is Jason's roommate from fly-boy school who is now flying with the Sun Kings on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

When are you vendors going to sell some of these telepresence systems to the US Navy so Kristi doesn't have to go months without seeing her honey? And if you had to pick a single ship in the US Navy that you were going to test telepresence on... as the article above makes painfully obvious... it would absolutely... positively... without a doubt... have to be... The USS Enterprise... Enjoy...

Sun King Hey Ya

Navy Carrier Squadron "Pump It"