I think I saw the future today. Of course, I’ve seen it all before….but that was in an episode of Star Trek. This was the real thing!!
I’d encourage you to visit http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html and take a quick look at this demo of the ‘Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Experience’ where holograms of two executives in California are beamed to a Stage in Bangalore, India and interact seamlessly with the CEO of Cisco, John Chambers. I’m not exaggerating when I say it looks virtually no different to if they were actually on the same stage together.
The two companies have clearly invested a lot of money in this system and they probably stand to make a lot of money too. But my interest is in the potential of this technology to change working lives. Business will be the first market for Telepresence and it has already been sold to companies in 23 different countries. After that it won’t be long before they start appearing in our homes!
There are several positive aspects to this advance – first, I can almost hear the sigh of relief from salesmen who pound out the motorway miles to get to and from customers each year. Imagine how stress levels will fall when you don’t have to get up at 5am to drive to the other end of the country – instead, you go to the office at the normal time and use Telepresence. Second, I can hear an equally large sigh of relief from the environment as cars are taken off the roads (which also benefits those who do have to commute) and less people need to fly for business purposes. Finally, consumers will benefit as the time to market for new products and technologies will be dramatically reduced because of the ease of having ‘face-to-face’ meetings using this system or ones like it.
Of course, it won’t actually be a face-to-face meeting – but you can’t get much closer to having one without actually being in the same room. I’m sure that using this system would take some getting used to, but compared with the stop-start nature of tele-conferencing it seems like this offers a whole new level of remote communication. Anyway, check out the demo and let me know what you think….and remember, this is not science-fiction!
