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Education in the Telepresence Space

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:12:21 -0500

Dr. R Shaun Edmonson of thereNow inc., a company that specializes in telepresence based education, spoke on the subject during the last day of Telepresence World. He was talking about how national education policy focuses its energy on large expenditures on technology for schools yet this technology never catches on or impacts the educational experience. He showed an interesting cycle of technology adoption in the educational space:

Introduction (Excitement)
Research (Promise)
Implementation (Problems)
Adoption (Disappointment)
Blame (Teachers)

The blame game is brought about because the ROI metric of education, test scores, never seem to be moved by the technology. Edmonson sees telepresence finally breaking this cycle because of its ability to facilitate 'cognitive apprenticeship' - a process by which a teacher shows you how to do something, you try to do it and then you get pointers from those teachers on how you did. Cognitive apprenticeship is seen by Edmonson as the best learning tool available and he cites telepresence technology as the first educational technology that facilitates this process rather than replacing it. Telepresence works on modeling, observation and talking - the studies thereNow performed backed up this hypothesis.

Later in the day we were joined by Dr. Helmuth Trefftz from Universidad EAFIT in Medellin, Columbia. He offered guidance on the direction of telepresence adoption in the developing world, saying Columbia wants to deploy 100 distance learning programs through 49 universities by 2010. They want to use the Renata, the Columbian version of Internet2, to deliver these services.

Trefftz contribution to the telepresence movement is a very interesting piece of software that enables interactive 3D modeling environments to be shared simultaneously across the web. The open-source software is written with very low bandwidth requirements in mind; only the coordinates being used in the 3D models are transferred and then reconstructed on each meeting participants PC. This system does not require high-end PCs to function properly.

Trefftz software development team has an ambitious goal: to create a freely available content library that acts as the backbone of Columbia's Distance Learning Program. They also want this library to be distributed via their software and telepresence hardware.

DVE's co-founder and CEO, Steve McNelley at Telepresence World

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:00:35 -0500

Steve McNelley, PhD, Co-Founder, DVE on stage at Telepresence World

The following article was written by Ed Kohler, a member of the Lab's TW2007 Coverage Partner, Technology Evangelist.

DVE has been getting a lot of attention at Telepresence World with the launch of their new tele-immersion system. However, when DVE's co-founder and CEO, Steve McNelley, PhD took the stage to present his thoughts on the telepresence industry, he decided to take a more high level approach than focusing on specific products. His presentation focused on what telepresence is with an anticipated steer toward what makes DVE's solutions unique.

McNelley defines telepresence as "eye contact" and has a beef with competitors who use terms like, "approximating eye contact" to market their telepresence solutions. Anything short of eye contact is not a true telepresence user experience as he defines the term.

He explained that many factors have to come together to create a telepresence experience, including appropriate conversational distances, true eye contact, and life size images of meeting guests.

Cameras places above monitors will project a down-looking image to attendees on the other end of the line. Placing the camera in front of the screen is intrusive. Putting it in the screen can work, but is also intrusive. Placing the camera behind the virtual guests who are projected on a transparent screen allows for capturing participants looking directly into guest's eyes on the other end of the connection.

The Telepresence Workplace: The Vision

McNelley laid out his vision for where he's like to see this industry move:

Put personal telepresence systems in everyone worker's corporate office across from their desk. This would provide immediate personal access for ad hoc meetings without the pain of scheduling access to a telepresence room. This brings us closer to a telepresence phone.
Roll out systems in homes to create face to face, eye to eye telecommuting, removing the disconnectedness telecommuters often suffer from. McNelley suggests that this has the potential for significant financial savings and improvement of quality of life.
Use products like the Codian's MCUs for multiple user telepresence calls on personal telepresence units using voice-activated switching situation.

McNelley didn't get into describing DVE's tele-immersion system where they've created a large conference room with strikingly realistic projections of meeting participants across the boardroom table. Technology Evangelist, in partnership with the Human Productivity Lab is conducting an interview with DVE as I write this, so look for that here and on HumanProductivityLab.com in the near future. The photo below from DVE shows an example of this technology, but doesn't do justice to how life-like this is when experience in person or on video.

Robot Doctors and Remote Presence

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 13:37:24 -0500

Day 3 of Telepresence World is filled with speeches that are showing the application of telepresence outside of the conference room, namely the medical applications of the technology. The first speech of the day that I got to see today was Yulung Wang, CEO of InTouch Health. He was talking about clinical robots that can aid in helping doctors remotely diagnose patients. He even brought out a robot named RP7 right on stage (pictured). These robots 'act' as remote doctors that monitor patients in ICUs. Each robot uses telepresence to communicate between the remote doctor and robot doctor, so the patient feels as if their own doctor is actually in the room with them. While the image quality is not that which you will see in a standard telepresence room, the solution is mobile.

Surprisingly, Wang reported studies that show patients prefer the robot care with their own doctor over that a real yet foreign ICU doctor at a 3:1 ratio. Another University of Maryland study showed the robot was so effective at diagnosing patients that the early hospital discharges by the robot halved hospital expenditures. This presence technology is an interesting example of how space can be bridged in such a way that it completely eliminates the perception of long-distance.

We also got to see Stephen Papadopoulos from the Barrow Neurological Institute. The large institute with over 50 fellows has a special medical telepresence application designed just for surgery teaching. The system takes a telepresence unit and broadcasts the surgery on the big displays in a remote location. Little screens on each desk show exactly what the surgeon is doing during the operation. Stephen even featured the HPL exclusive video we produced last year ago when the room was first deployed:

Tom Szabo, CEO of Telanetix at Telepresence World

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:14:27 -0500

Tom Szabo, CEO of Telanetix, On Stage and On Screen

The CEO of Telanetix, Tom Szabo, delivered a presentation titled, "Driving Telepresence ROI with New Technology" which took at look at the driving forces behind growth in the Telepresence industry.

Reflecting on the current growth in the telepresence market, Szabo suggested that, "telepresence is turning into an overnight success that's been 20-years in the making."

It's all about driving the applications down to the user level. That's key to making this a big market.

Telepresence today, is largely a communications tool used between C-level employees within a company or between companies. However, Szabo explained that some of the biggest opportunities for improving business efficiency comes from getting this technology into the hands of mid-level employees like product developers, film production crews, and similar groups who do a lot of collaborative decision making throughout their business days.

He explained that sales are generally limited to only a small handful of units when sold as a C-level solution, but that number explodes when sold as solutions deeper within organizations.

Szabo summarized four drivers for growth in the telepresence industry:

1. Usability: It's only just in the past 12 months that telepresence has been as easy as pressing a button once set up. Telepresence systems have to be "CEO-proof" when sold as C-level as they are today.

2. Accommodation of Technology: Users shouldn't have to accommodate the technology in any way. Instead, they should be able to conduct business and communicate in ways that are comfortable for them rather than being forced to learn to communicate all over again. They should be able to walk around, use whiteboards, etc.

3. Data handling. Telepresence is currently a tool used by CEOs or high level managers who focus primarily on face to face interactions. Employees deeper in a country would benefit more from solutions that enable sharing applications or products. This form of collaboration has the potential to significantly decrease approval wait times. Sharing tools and applications in full resolution at a remote location is where things get interesting.

4. Cost: It has to be affordable to get it into the core part of businesses. Pricing has to be justifiable for rolling out telepresence solutions deep in companies.

Put another way, when telepresence systems are easier to use, more flexible, more powerful, and cheaper, this industry will really take off.

Publically Available Telepresence and the Network Effect: Cisco and Regus Perspective

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 18:31:00 -0500

The following article was written by Ed Kohler, a member of the Lab's TW2007 Coverage Partner, Technology Evangelist.

While pretty much all of the telepresence solutions on display at Telepresence World are impressive and have the ability to improve business communications, the power of this is largely limited by the number of units deployed. It doesn't take a telepresence expert to understand that spending hundred of thousands of dollars to enable face to face conversations between only two people is rarely justified. But as soon as a third, then fourth, fifth and counting unit connects to the network, the number of communications opportunities grows exponentially.

Cisco's James Peters explained this concept in a presentation titled, "Public Telepresence: The Network Effect" and focused primarily on a worldwide telepresence initiative between Cisco and Regus, the largest supplier of office space, meeting and conference rooms in the world. Regus is planning on rolling out 50 Cisco powered conference rooms around the globe starting in 2008. The telepresence powered conference rooms will be available for rent by business people for conferences between Regus centers as well as Regus to business installations of Cisco telepresence systems. Park Ave in New York City and Atlanta are two early location mentioned for Regus telepresence centers.

The goal here is to apply Metcalfe's Law regarding the power of communications networks to telepresence.

Cisco and Regus has been listening to demand for telepresence solutions, and have found opportunities largely near companies who are interested in integrating telepresence into their workflow, but can't justify dedicated units on their own campuses.

TW2007 Day 2: Tom Jackson, Mission Benefits CEO

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 18:22:48 -0500

Tom Jackson, current CEO of Mission Benefits and the former CEO of the early telepresence company Telesuite, started his speech with an interesting question - how do we take telepresence to the masses? His answer (and some other industry experts agree) is publically available telepresence.

His main argument for the need of publically available telepresence is related to the cost of telepresence systems versus their usage. Even in the highest usage environments, systems usually top out at 5hr/day of usage according to Tom. With 720 hours in a month, this means the rooms only run about 100 hours a month or just 15%. These rooms cost sometimes half a million dollars and most non-Fortune 100 companies have a hard time justifying that cost, even with the added benefits they know telepresence will bring. In this situation, Tom sees a large market developing.

Due to the price of telepresence, he describes these systems as capital intensive technologies that require exceptionally high use rates to justify their purchase. To explain the relationship, Tom used a rather interesting analogy where he showed that, for a single Airbus A380, that costs $300 million, you could buy 1000 telepresence rooms, which would essentially seed the world with publically available telepresence. According to Tom, speed, convenience, productivity and safety are THE four pillars that help sell these massively large capital goods like telepresence - not 'reduced travel costs.' All of these form the basis of Tom's argument for publically available telepresence.

Tom rounded off his presentation by describing what he thought the ideal publically available telepresence company would look: young, entrepreneur, USD$20 million in capital, network and facilities partners, business friendly site locations, 7-10 member companies, well known CEO, service oriented company and the ability to break even Day 1.

TW2007 Day 2: Barry Nalls, Masergy CEO

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:19:12 -0500

Masergy CEO Barry Nalls was the next speaker at Telepresence World today and he had some salient advice. His first order of business was to establish telepresence as a savings model for business. He did this by explaining that telepresence enables communication thereby allowing more goods to come to market more quickly for companies that adopt it. This creates an indirect cost benefit in addition to the more logical reduction in travel expenses associated with a product such as telepresence.

He reiterated some of the sentiments Aaron McCormick of BT mentioned a day prior: the complexity and failure of legacy videoconferencing to deliver on its promises has significantly hampered the adoption of telepresence solutions. To that end, he underscored the importance of the human factors when addressing group communication.

After those interesting points, we got some of the Masergy sales pitch. Their biggest selling point is identical infrastructure services across the globe, regardless of location (they use an MPLS network if you are interested). They also use embedded services they pioneered to monitor all their networks worldwide and can upgrade bandwidth via the web. Most important for telepresence though, Masergy employs a 'daily throttle' they use to adjust traffic needs away from the systems when they aren't being used thus creating a multipurpose pipe the entire organization can use.

TW2007 Day 2: Martyn Lewis, European Chairman of Teliris

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:06:14 -0500

Martyn Lewis - European Chairman - Teliris

The following article was written by Ed Kohler, a member of the Lab's TW2007 Coverage Partner, Technology Evangelist.

One thing that is fairly ironic about the Telepresence conference is how many people are in attendance. As in, people have traveled to San Diego from all over the world where they're discussing how their technology solutions allow you to avoid traveling all over the world.

This led me to wonder, "why aren't more of the presentations being done via telepresence solutions from the solutions providers?" For example, Charles Stucki from Cisco mentioned that John Chambers was a real believer in telepresence, and Chambers would have loved to make it to the telepresence show. Why didn't they schedule a Cisco powered presentation where Chambers addressed the telepresence audience for a few minutes during Stucki's presentation?

The first presentation that followed through was Teliris' European Charman, Martyn Lewis, who presented at the conference from eight time zones East in London. He mentioned that this allowed him to save four days of travel and jet lag. And it also helped proved the effectiveness of their technology.

Was it effective? His presentation garnered a large applause. The live Q&A that followed seemed as natural as if he was physically on the stage. The biggest area where it falls short is following the speech when he surely would have been approached by audience members with business cards in hand. Teliris has other team members on staff, so that's accounted for at some level, but could that be the key connection that generates new business?

TW2007 Day 2: Cameron Durke, Director of the San Diego Office of the Governor of California

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 12:38:44 -0500

Office of the Governor of California brought us their San Diego representative named Cameron Drukel. He highlighted some of the very progressive policies the state has adopted in order to combat global warming. The focus of his speech was the idea that goods movement is the central pollution mechanism creating greenhouse gases. To that end, Drukel's speech implied that advanced technologies, such as telepresence, are going to dent the total amount of goods and communication related traffic, thereby reducing greenhouse gas CO2.

Drukel went through an exhaustive list of policies that Arnold Schwarzenegger has pursued as the Governator including a low carbon fuel standard that will reduce nitrogen greenhouse emissions, green building initiatives, taking old cars off the road and the signing of a pact between California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona to reduce their emission through a CO2 market-based trading scheme.

A Moment with Telanetix

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:06:08 -0500

Today I had the chance to spend some time with our friends over at Telanetix. They had some very interesting telepresence offerings to show off today. Pictured above is their Digital Presence solution - a 4 screen plasma setup that can interact with multiple sites around the world simultaneously. 2 of the 4 side screens display static content, like reports and movies where the 2 center screens display the conference members.

It is an SDTV solution, which may disappoint you, but the upshot is reduced variable costs that come from lower QOS bandwidth requirements. In total, you will only need a 2+ megabit pipe to run this solution. Digital Presence has the ability to adapt to various installation setups and layouts. It can interface with Polycom and Tandberg through universal codecs that give the system some serious legs. Yet, its not an HDTV solution.

The Lab will do a more thorough examination of this and other telepresence choices in our next whitepaper coming out this fall, Telepresence Options.

We also briefly saw the smaller Digital Presence model with two screens at the front of their basecamp. I did not get a lot of details about it but it seems to be a smaller version of the system above and likely has similar strengths and weaknesses. Congratulations to Telanetix for a solid display at Telepresence World this year. We will be talking with them further in the days to come.