Jerky video the size of a large postage stamp and tinny audio. Lengthy presentations that take over your whole desktop, with a tiny chat window at the side. Web chats and online meetings save you travel but they don’t give you eye contact, body language or the feeling that you’ve actually met someone.
High-definition video conferencing claims to give you the benefits of a real meeting without the hassle of travel. Just how good are the dedicated video rooms – and how much will they cost you? Or can you do high-definition on a low budget?
Humans are social animals; we like to get together. We’re often better at explaining things out loud that we are at writing them down and face to face meetings are still the best way to get many things done. For a start, you’re giving the meeting your full attention, you can hear and see the other people clearly, you can read any documents involved and get a good look at any physical objects that are relevant to the discussion.
A lively discussion means people are going to interrupt each other, which is much easier when you can see the expression on someone’s face – you know sooner if you haven’t convinced them. You never meet anyone useful in the hall after an online meeting, either. Sometimes there’s a side benefit too - a good meal, a nice place to visit, time to look around.
But other times, you travel for three hours each way for a 90 minute meeting and spend the first 20 minutes trying to get the projector working. Or you can only fit in one meeting when you want to talk to two separate teams, but one is in Ireland and the other is in Scotland.
Never mind global warming concerns or rising petrol prices. If you can replace long security lines, cramped seats and anonymous business hotels with a high quality video conference in the comfort of your office and have a real meeting rather than a glorified phone call, you could be much more productive. If you can make decisions with two or four teams in a day rather than just one, you can speed up business processes and development cycles. The question is whether video conferencing is good enough to replace a face to face meeting – and how much that will cost you.
[b]What tech does it take?[/b]
True high-definition video conferencing needs a lot more than a Webcam at your desk or an ISDN line. The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) in San Diego has a 100 million pixel display wall (made of LCD screens mounted side by side) and an auditorium with a Sony projector running at four times the resolution of 1080 HD.
"This isn’t video conferencing," says Larry Smarr, the founding director of CalIT2. "This is telepresence. This is the elimination of distance. The technology is now here to make distances disappear, to make the world wormhole connected. The question is how will we live and work in this world?"
On a 4x HD connection, you can look people in the eye and see whether they follow your argument. You can also lean forward and read not just the headlines but all the text in the slides on the HD screen of the MacBook on their desk as if it was sitting in front of you.
[b]Making it look real[/b]
None of the commercial systems offer this resolution. For a start, the 10Gb connection you need for 1,500Mbps of video data is hard to come by if you're not on the Internet 2 backbone. You can get a lifelike experience that feels like a face to face meeting with HD resolution, but it’s still a significant investment. Systems like HP’s Halo (built with Smarr’s help) and Ciso Telepresence are built in to a meeting room, with multiple screens, integrated cameras and sound systems (that let you tell where in the room a speaker is sitting), high bandwidth networks and even specially designed lighting.
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In a Halo room, even the finish on the table in front of the screens is designed not to cast too many reflections and the front wall is a shade lighter than the rear wall so it tones with the life-size image of the rear wall in the room you’re looking at on three HD plasma screens. The table itself doesn’t go all the way to the screens, because HP found this tended to make users seasick.
The details of the experience were fine tuned with the help of the first Halo customer, who has plenty of experience making things look good on a big screen. DreamWorks uses Halo to keep up with the punishing schedule of releasing two animated films a year. Halo meant Jerry Seinfield didn’t have to leave his New York office and travel to California for meetings about Bee Movie.
Pepsico still sends executives and sales teams to meet customers, but they have more time to do that because they do internal meetings using Halo. HP uses Halo internally and credits the 30 rooms it has installed with getting one product to market six months earlier than if engineers had been flying between California and Singapore. A new Halo room might get used for 40 or 50 hours of meetings a month, but the average at HP is 200 hours a month, which means the room is in use 10 or 12 hours a day. “The Halo rooms are not used by executives,” says Halo general manager Ken Crangle. “They’re used by engineers and marketing. They’re used by people who would never have travelled.”
AMD’s Halo users used to travel; the company was able to get rid of corporate flats it kept for visiting employees. HP itself saves around $300,000 a year on travel. You’ll need to save money with Halo - prices have halved since HP first introduces it but a room costs around $250,000 (more if you include a camera that transmits images of objects you place on the table to the fourth screen usually used for sharing documents and presentations).
Plus, there’s a monthly operations fee of $18,000. For that, HP runs the network that Halo connects to via a 45Mbit T3 (each of the three screens need 6-8Mbit of bandwidth). The speed is crucial for body language to come across says Crangle: “It’s got to be lifesize, it’s got to be instant so it’s got to be fibre.”
That’s why the screens are plasma, with a 40-60 millisecond response time; the video has to reach the other room within 250 milliseconds, including encoding, encryption and decoding.
Cisco’s TelePresence system is similar to Halo, from the maximum latency of 250 milliseconds to the spatial audio and the three 65” plasma screens over the table, “because two reasonably normal sized people can fit in that size comfortably,” says David Hsieh, director of marketing for TelePresence.
The $299,000 price tag is similar too. Again, the lighting is custom designed. Steven Spielberg’s cinematographer Janusz Kaminski suggested brown walls rather than blue and lighting from the front because overhead lights give you unnatural skin tones and shadows on the screen.
There are small differences, though. HP puts a fourth screen for shared documents above the participants, Cisco puts it below. The camera is mounted on the central screen. That’s more intrusive than the three cameras that Halo uses which are above each screen, mainly because it reminds you that the person you're talking to isn't actually in the room with you.
Problems getting meetings started have put many executives off traditional video conferencing. The controls for Halo are straightforward and the system checks itself when you turn it on. TelePresence integrates with Microsoft Outlook and you can schedule meetings by booking two rooms rather than one then start the meeting by dialling on a standard office phone; the system is a SIP endpoint and Hsieh jokes that it’s “the world's most expensive telephone.”
[b]Talking to other people[/b]
One major difference from Halo is that you have run your own network for TelePresence, which is why it’s more complicated for Cisco to develop HD interconnections. You can reach any Halo room from any other, so you can use the system to talk to customers and partners who’ve invested in it, and it can also interconnect with Tandberg systems.
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Cisco is working on interconnections for its TelePresence system, but currently you can only use it within your own organization at HD or with other video conferencing systems at standard definition.
To get round this, Proctor and Gamble is putting TelePresence rooms into facilities that are close to suppliers and customers, so they can come to one facility for a meeting with staff who work elsewhere in the company. P&G uses the system for product development and to synchronise product launches. Interoperability will be crucial if customers are going to use the system in the other ways Cisco expects, like negotiating mergers and acquisitions. “When you discuss which head of sales will end up in charge,” says Hsieh, “you don't do it over email or on the phone.”
Within three years, Cisco plans to have an HD video conferencing system for use at home, offering 1080p video on a 65” screen, based on a single-screen $80,000 TelePresence setup it already puts in executive offices. Chief executive John Chambers has one, as does the receptionist who handles enquiries on all the floors of the Cisco Enterprise Briefing Centre without walking up and down stairs all day. This needs around 2Mbps per screen for a conversation that still has no noticeable latency.
HP has recently introduced a mobile Halo setup that you can move from room to room or install without needing to build it in. The $120,000 Halo Collaboration Center has a single large screen and camera, mounted on an angled wall and attached to a table for consistent lighting and positioning. This is the kind of Halo system that HP will soon be installing in some Marriot hotels.
[b]DIY HD[/b]
Polycom, Tandberg and Sony all have HD video conferencing components, but you have to put a system together yourself (or work with a reseller). You can get a 720p HD connection with a single screen on a connection that’s at least 2Mbps but remember that putting a screen into a standard meeting room is a much less lifelike and immersive experience. LifeSize promises 720p HD at 1Mbps and a basic setup costs at little as £3,500 per location although multiple screens and cameras take installation prices up to over £20,000. The LifeSize Room isn’t a Halo-style installation; it’s a camera, speakerphone, remote control and conferencing adapter that you can connect two monitors and four remote sites to.
If you want to try out conferencing with something just a little better than a standard Webcam while you wait for true high definition prices to drop, version 3.6 of Skype offers 640 by 480 resolution video at 25-30 frames per second if you’re using the right Logitech camera (a Quickcam Pro 9000, Quickcam Sphere AF or Quickcam Pro for Notebooks). These models have Carl Zeiss lenses, fast autofocus – so the video can get a business card in focus in under three seconds – 2 megapixel sensors, automatic adjustment for unusually dark or bright backgrounds, noise cancelling microphones and the right drivers to do what Skype calls ‘High Quality Video’.
Encoding and decoding the video means you need a dual core PC to cope with it and both ends of the conversation need fast broadband (384Kbps or above).
VGA resolution is a far cry from HD but it’s still eight times as much information as standard Skype video calls. You don’t get the feeling that you’re almost in the same room but high-quality Skype is good enough for full screen video where you can see the expression on someone’s face and read a business card if they hold it up to the camera.
Microsoft’s futuristic-looking RoundTable camera isn’t high definition either, but it’s smarter than a Webcam. You get a 640 by 480 view of the active speaker, but the five cameras and six microphones work together to produce a panorama view of the room so you can look around and see how everyone is reacting. The RoundTable adjusts the brightness, white balance and size of images to avoid problems with bright windows, dark corners and people at the far end of the table looking noticeably smaller. The panorama view is 1056 by 144 at 15 frames per second, and needs 500Kbps, so you can use it over standard DSL connections and office networks.
When someone starts talking, the active view switches to them automatically by detecting the sound and calculating the direction it comes from; it also checks for a face so you're not seeing an image of a speakerphone or the whiteboard their voice is reflecting off. If you're using Microsoft Office LiveMeeting you see the panorama and active speaker in the meeting window – and if you record it you can skip through the meeting based on who is talking.
You can also see the panorama view in a OneNote shared session; the RoundTable shows up as a standard USB camera and if you use it with tools like Skype or Office Communicator you don't get the panorama view but the video does switch to the active speaker automatically.
Again, RoundTable’s video quality doesn’t give you the feeling of presence you get with high-end systems like Halo and it’s no substitute for a real meeting. With Halo or Telepresence, you do feel you've actually met the people you see on screen. At £1,500, though, it’s far cheaper and seeing everyone is a huge improvement over a conference call that leaves you struggling to work out who’s saying what.
Even Skype and the right Webcam give you better communication than a phone call alone. But if you want true high definition conferencing you’ll have to pay a high price, wait a few years – or leave the office after all.
Author: Mary Branscombe
IT Pro Online