Video Ga Ga: My first telepresence

Comment: Tony Chan

The room installed with the Cisco telepresense system wasn’t all that big. Inside the elongated room was a long curved desk that stretched the length of the room. Mirroring the curve of the desk on the facing wall, to form kind of an eye shape if you looked from directly above, was a bank of three large screens connected together to form a single display.

On the screens were the participants of the telepresense session from Singapore. Their faces were far closer than they would have been if they were sitting at the same distance as the screens themselves. The angle was a bit off as the camera mounted at the top of the screen sloped down, so everyone looked like they were staring down when they were in fact looking directly on the screen.

On that day, there were a total of nine of us on the front row on both side of the session, plus a handful of PR people sitting on the back.

The whole system works incredible well. The image was crystal clear and sound was impressive. And during the initiative introductory session, when Professor Simon Tay gave his discourse on the newly completed research on corporate sustainability, the experience certainly matches and even exceeds that of being in the same room as the speaker.

Because of the proximity of the screens, the audience in Hong Kong all had Professor Tay sitting right in front of each of us. To physically sit in such a way would simply not work as people sitting on either side of the Professor would have blocked the view for those of us sitting on the edge.
This was hyper reality.

While listening to the professor, it wasn’t long before I felt the gaze of the camera. While sitting in meetings, it is often easy to fade into the background because people do get distracted by the speaker. But with telepresence, the camera is always on, and the people on the other side have little to do but to look in front of them to the screen, and that means you. So instead of the centre of attention going from one speaker to the next, all the eyes of the participants in one location are fixed on the screen showing the participants in the other location.

Speaking of eyes, eye-contact, one of the most important elements of a successful interview, is not available with telepresence. Because the image is captured by the camera, you can never look directly at the person that you are addressing. Oh, you can look in the general direction, but not directly at the person.

All up, the experience was a pleasant and productive one, if only a little disconcerting because it was so real and yet not real. The faces were right in front of me, but no one looked me in the eye. And while I kept trying to look people in the eye, they kept looking away when they were speaking to me.

And obviously, I couldn’t exactly get people’s business cards, which is almost a ritual here in Asia before or after any meeting. A business card scanner and printer in the room would have been good, so people can insert their business cards to the scanner at one end and have it printed out on the other – not exactly hand to hand, but better than nothing.

One obvious advantage to telepresence is that the system is so popular that most time slots are reserved, hence meetings can never overrun as the next person is lining up outside to use the system.

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Tags: Cisco, telepresence

Category: Applications