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Cisco "telepresence" solved this 15 years ago. Standardized rooms on both sides with high quality cameras and low latencies. Polycom had a similar but worse set

Cisco "telepresence" solved this 15 years ago. Standardized rooms on both sides with high quality cameras and low latencies. Polycom had a similar but worse setup at the time. The Cisco experience was very close to being in a shared meeting with the other people. It made meetings across continents work very well and was an actual competitor to flying everywhere. Between the hardware being too expensive and the link requirements being very high I only ever saw it implemented in multinational telecoms for whom it was an actual work tool but also something to impress their clients with. Either Cisco needed to bring down the cost massively to expand access or someone needed to build it in major cities and bill by the hour to compete against flying. None of those happened so it stayed a niche. Compared to those experiences more than a decade ago the common VC is still very slowly catching up. Part of it is setup, like installing VC rooms with 2 smaller TVs side by side instead of one large one so you can see the document and the other people at decent sizes. But part of it is still the technology. Those "telepresences" were almost surely on a dedicated link running on the telecom core network that guaranteed quality instead of routing through the internet and randomly failing. I suspect getting really low latency will require that kind of telecom level QoS otherwise you'll be increasing buffer sizes to avoid freezes.

ponker 6y ago
Cisco and HP Halo were incredible but the biggest problem they had was 1) the requirement to build out an actual room for it and 2) the shitty software setup experience. The big corporates that could afford to build out real estate for VCs also bogged the shit down in "enterpriseyness" that made the shit impossible to use.
- wil421 6y ago
  I worked at a company that had a Cisco telepresence machine on wheels. You had to make sure it was plugged into a certain color Ethernet wall jack for it to work but every room had one. You could reserve it and then wheel it to the conference room you wanted.
  - ponker 6y ago
    That's nothing like a Cisco telepresence room. You have to have used one to understand. It's nothing too sci-fi -- not floor to ceiling curved displays or whatnot -- but just the multiple large TVs all in a curved setup on the other side of a curved table makes a huge difference.
    - glandium 6y ago
      And a standardized wall color and camera location, so that everyone that joins in from another telepresence room blends in as if they were really there.
      - fludlight 6y ago
        Here's a picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_TelePresence#/media/File:Early_CTS-3000_Prototype.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_TelePresence#/media/File...
        glandium 6y ago
        It would seem like they relaxed rules about what's in the background. But then, my knowledge is from a Telepresence room having been setup at a previous employer somewhere between 10 and 15 years ago (and I wasn't directly involved).
        blackrock 6y ago
        It would be interesting if a camera was on top of every tv, so that you have a 1-to-1 with every recipient. That way, when you turn your head to the person on each tv, it would seem as if you were actually looking at them.
        glandium 6y ago
        Getting off topic here, but this makes me think of what can be seen now in some Japanese programs because of social distancing measures. I don't know what kind of setup they have, but in some programs, from the spectator's perspective, you see people lined up behind a table, but some of them are actually on large monitors that make them appear at the right size. The interesting thing is that the ones on monitors act like if they were actually there, turning their head in the direction of the person speaking.
- Cerium 6y ago
  About 10 years ago I go to go on a tour of the Taiwan HP office. One thing that stands out in my mind was the telepresence rooms. Absolutely fabulous, large table, with screens across the table that showed high fidelity low latency image of whoever was sitting at a connected table.
- pfranz 6y ago
  Latency was still a huge issue with the HP Halo. I remember a specific meeting where they talked about upgrading the audio codec which didn't seem to address things much. It was kind of a running joke that any applause or laughter would and with a huge, noticable lag between locations.
blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
My first job out of school was doing product verification for the cameras that were used in those Cisco systems! It was pretty impressive, I think they managed to squeeze 1080p at 60fps over USB2. Had a lot of fun building jigs and testing setups to test the MTBF on a tight time frame

ponker 6y ago

Cisco and HP Halo were incredible but the biggest problem they had was 1) the requirement to build out an actual room for it and 2) the shitty software setup experience. The big corporates that could afford to build out real estate for VCs also bogged the shit down in "enterpriseyness" that made the shit impossible to use.

wil421 6y ago
I worked at a company that had a Cisco telepresence machine on wheels. You had to make sure it was plugged into a certain color Ethernet wall jack for it to work but every room had one. You could reserve it and then wheel it to the conference room you wanted.
- ponker 6y ago
  That's nothing like a Cisco telepresence room. You have to have used one to understand. It's nothing too sci-fi -- not floor to ceiling curved displays or whatnot -- but just the multiple large TVs all in a curved setup on the other side of a curved table makes a huge difference.
  - glandium 6y ago
    And a standardized wall color and camera location, so that everyone that joins in from another telepresence room blends in as if they were really there.
    - fludlight 6y ago
      Here's a picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_TelePresence#/media/File:Early_CTS-3000_Prototype.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_TelePresence#/media/File...
      - glandium 6y ago
        It would seem like they relaxed rules about what's in the background. But then, my knowledge is from a Telepresence room having been setup at a previous employer somewhere between 10 and 15 years ago (and I wasn't directly involved).
      - blackrock 6y ago
        It would be interesting if a camera was on top of every tv, so that you have a 1-to-1 with every recipient. That way, when you turn your head to the person on each tv, it would seem as if you were actually looking at them.
        glandium 6y ago
        Getting off topic here, but this makes me think of what can be seen now in some Japanese programs because of social distancing measures. I don't know what kind of setup they have, but in some programs, from the spectator's perspective, you see people lined up behind a table, but some of them are actually on large monitors that make them appear at the right size. The interesting thing is that the ones on monitors act like if they were actually there, turning their head in the direction of the person speaking.
Cerium 6y ago
About 10 years ago I go to go on a tour of the Taiwan HP office. One thing that stands out in my mind was the telepresence rooms. Absolutely fabulous, large table, with screens across the table that showed high fidelity low latency image of whoever was sitting at a connected table.
pfranz 6y ago
Latency was still a huge issue with the HP Halo. I remember a specific meeting where they talked about upgrading the audio codec which didn't seem to address things much. It was kind of a running joke that any applause or laughter would and with a huge, noticable lag between locations.

blahbhthrow3748 6y ago

My first job out of school was doing product verification for the cameras that were used in those Cisco systems! It was pretty impressive, I think they managed to squeeze 1080p at 60fps over USB2. Had a lot of fun building jigs and testing setups to test the MTBF on a tight time frame