The Inside Story of Telepresence: only a handshake away from the real thing
Clive Sawkins, Operations Director Unified Communications and Emerging Technologies, European Markets, and Phil Marechal, Product Manager, give us the low-down on TelePresence – Cisco’s innovative, new technology that creates unique, in-person experiences between people, places, and events in their work and personal lives—over the network.NETACAD ADVANTAGE: Telepresence. What is the deal?
CLIVE SAWKINS: If you know someone well, a simple phone conversation will suffice. There is no need to see eye to eye in order to avoid miscommunication. MeetingPlace adds collaboration features to this scenario — it lets users share documents, presentations and even whiteboards. You can record conversations and share it with others later on. The next step is TelePresence, which adds true-to-life vide.
PHIL MARECHAL: Charlie Giancarlo, the Chief Technical Officer of Cisco, wanted to create a much better visual collaboration experience beyond traditional video conferencing. He saw a prototype of a future generation technology and decided that Cisco could build a better system that incorporated advances in the network as a platform. He formed a small team under Marthin DeBeer, Vice President General Manager of EMTG (Emerging Markets Technology Group). The team created the product in less than two years and designed it from a blank sheet of paper.
The resulting system is state of the art and exceeds any system in the market place today by at least a generation in design.
NA: Okay – so what is it? What is the technology behind it?
PHIL MARECHAL: The technology is based on advanced video and audio compression technologies like H.264 for video and AAC-LD for audio. These compression technologies were combined with high definition television standards like 720p and 1080p. The resulting system is based on technology standard but also extends them in a platform that has more than 24 patents in design and methodology.
Cisco also integrated the TelePresence technology with Cisco Call Manager so the system is as easy to use as a telephone call and has a Cisco IP telephone as the user interface.
NA: So much for the theory. How does it work in practice?
CLIVE SAWKINS: You really get the impression that you are sitting in the same room as the other participants. It was funny to see how people who used TelePresence for the first time would stare at the screen in front of them in a somewhat unaccustomed way, only to stand up at the end of the conversation to shake hands with the other participants. There’s no place to hide.
P.M.: We have seen examples where people have tried to shake hands with the TelePresence users on the screen. We have also seen children trying to hug their grandparents on the screen in another city.
NA: Sounds like green IT? Is Telepresence an environmentally friendly solution?
CS: It is a green solution — it keeps people from boarding an airplane, it reduces polluting emissions. It’s a great tool. People should really start using it. I am definitely not saying that face-to-face meetings will be a thing of the past; TelePresence is a tool in the big toolbox of Unified Communications.
NA: Are there any disadvantages in using Telepresence? Is it easy to install and use?
P.M.: TelePresence is designed for the enterprise market today. In the future Cisco will build products for vertical markets like education and medical. We also want to extend the architecture to consumers beyond enterprise business customers. It is also very easy to install and use since it is a telephone call.
NA: Sounds ambitious. So, would you say that Telepresence represents Cisco’s vision of the future?
CS: TelePresence is the start of a new journey. Bandwidth has always been the limiting factor. Now it is becoming progressively cheaper and more widely available to an increasing number of people, I think that people will eventually have a TelePresence-like environment installed in their homes. Why would something like that remain limited to business environments? A precondition, however, is that these products should be available at the right price. This will certainly happen, and sufficient and cheap bandwidth should be available. This development will be supported by 4G mobile networks, fibre-optic connections to homes, a new generation of service providers with new networks and heavy-duty video switches (which we will introduce shortly). It is a natural evolution of Unified Communications in the TelePresence arena. I can see us using TelePresence in the car in a couple of years from now. Who knows…
P.M.: We want to continue research into TelePresence research applications and technologies so that in a few years we move from the two dimensional experience to an actual three dimensional experience.
CS: Voice and video are real-time applications. Networks should be ready to support this technology. In other words, you need to have a network roadmap in place. Never before have networks formed such an important platform, especially as a result of the advent of solutions such as TelePresence. Everything we have said about intelligent networks and networks-as-platforms during the last few years converges in applications such as UC, and TelePresence in particular. The network will form the basis for the entire architecture. It is not a commodity, nor will it ever be. Although some people would like to see it that way, with the intelligence included in the applications, that’s not how it is. It is precisely the combination of the network and applications that results in the equation that one plus one makes three.