TelePresence and UX
I sit on the advisory board for the CIS program at Gwinnett Technical College which met last night at Scientific Atlanta which is now a Cisco company. They demo some of their technology, the coolest being the Cisco TelePresence product that was on 24 last Monday night. We got to see the TelePresence 3000 (click this to see a large image). Here's some notes about it.
- Point to point call manager
- You can book a call in Outlook, it just shows up as a resource
- there is an auto-collaborate mode that let's you show your desktop.
- The screens run at 1080p and 60 fps
- Each screen is 50 inches
- They use about 2 to 2.5 meg in bandwidth (5 meg would be optimal)
- Cost to use after installation and setup? zero
- Right now if must run on the same network, they are working on running over others
- Everything from the table forward is included in the cost
- There can be 36 segments. (1 screen is one segment and 3 screens is the max at one location)
- It uses spacial audio so when a person talks you here it coming from that direction
- You can here a person whisper
- The people in the call are life sized.
- The room has a special design and color at all locations.
- It's voice activated
- Optional 50 inch overhead monitor
The interesting thing about it is that you have a more personal experience on the call. And it holds your attention. (I'm sure everyone has been on a teleconference before and heard the sound of a tapping keyboard.) The experience (and therefore the UX) was personal, realistic and compelling.
They also have some pretty cool things in R&D, like projecting a virtual desktop at each seat. I could see it, pushing a document across the (virtual) table to your counterpart in India.
Kudos to Cisco for using UX for product design.