Telepresence

At one point in time, most conferences held by small to major corporations occurred in boardroom or a special room used for this type of activity. It required all members of the conference to be present whether they were local or from out-of-town. This type of meeting could be quite expensive for the company when you consider all of the costs involved for the presence of the participants. This was normally the case until the existence of telepresence.

According to Wikipedia, telepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance that they were present, or to have an effect, at a location other than their true location. Additionally, it requires that the senses of the user, or users, are provided with such stimuli as to give the feeling of being in that other location. They may be given, in many cases, the ability to sense the participants’ movements, voice, action, position and other elements. This information can be traveling in both directions and sensed by both the users and those at the remote location.

Telepresence requires the use of corporate networks. In many cases this includes the use of T1 or ISDN lines which provide enough speed to give a live effect, in both sound and video, between the users at both locations. Other networking speeds could be acceptable however there may be a ‘jittering’ effect when they are used.

The history of telepresence is relatively short. Founded in 1993 by two gentlemen, David Allen and Harold Williams, who developed a telepresence company called Teleport. Teleport later changed their name to TeleSuite to better fit the product. The original intent was to develop a system which would allow interaction between families across great distance without the expense of flying.

In the mid 1990’s, Microsoft and Creative Labs teamed up to offer Net Meeting, which offered the average home user with the ability for telepresence. The use of 56K modems at the time however, didn’t offer the necessary speed to make it a viable option for business users because of the jumpiness of the video screens involved.

There are several different companies today that are involved in offering products that can provide a smooth telepresence for companies today. They include, but are not limited to, Cisco, Polycom, Hewlett Packard, LifeSize, Teliris, Telanetix, Tandberg and BrightCom. The prices of these systems have a wide variance in cost, ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pricing will dictate the number of microphones, speakers, cameras, high definition monitors and other elements used with the product. The packages can also offer life-size video and transmission delays that are not detectable.

Many industry specialists saw 2008 as a banner year for telepresence. Many major corporations are using the technology to connect their offices in the United States as well as those that are located worldwide to hold meetings. There are several new forums, RSS news feeds and web sites available today that are providing information on this particular topic as well.