But Where Else Will I Roll My Eyes?
After numerous conference calls, I’m convinced that if people aren’t rolling their eyes, sniggering, falling asleep or gesturing in confusion when I’m talking, it’s going to karmically happen eventually. Because that’s what I’m doing during those calls.
And it got me thinking about a bunch of these newfangled (yes, I’m a tech writer, but I still say newfangled like a 60 year-old housewife) videoconferencing solutions like Cisco’s Telepresence and HP’s Halo, where a ‘real’ meeting is simulated as best as possible.
What these do is have a studio-lit room outfitted with a line of high-definition screens and a half-table. Kind of like a crescent.
The table merges visually into the other crescent image provided by the screens projecting an identical half-meeting room from the caller/callee.
Get it? It’s ridiculous explaining but a lot easier if you just looked at the picture.
Anyway, when I attended the press preview of this some months back, they were saying that companies are willing to invest in these (a cool US$1 mil for the HP Halo system, by the way) because it bridges the gap that phone conferences provide.
Which is just a nice way of saying no one can tell when you’re covering your mouth, sniggering, or picking lint off your shirt, or glaring at the phone (as my editor does, at times), or flipping it the bird, or resting your head lightly on the table.
What will happen to teleconferencing as we know it? Will we actually, gasp, have to pay attention?
Good thing the images projected stop waist down, and we can still subtly nudge each others’ knees. Or be in shorts.
Eh I don’t think the geeks at the back of the office have anything to worry about - we will still be using plain ol’ telephones for years to come.. all this will be the preserve of sales folk and other such spiffily-dressed folk. Our ability to flip the bird at unbelievable statements made by the other side shall remain safe :)
Of course by the time something like this finally makes it way to the IT guys, “everyone else” will be using Virtual Reality or something like that.
Oh dear bunny will be very unhappy if this gets implemented at her workplace. Hahahahhahahahha.
You know what would be REALLy funny, if the IT guy sets the camera alignment wrong, and the effect is somewhere like you’re speaking to the person at the other end, but looking at them…off center. Kinda like how you feel uncomfortable when a cock-eyed person is talking to you.
NOW THAT would be funny.
jody> Actually, you wouldn’t be far off from the truth. At the demo, we were asked to speak into the camera that’s stuck on the top of the panel of HD screens. So if you try to look at the people and make ‘eye-contact’, you look like you’re not really looking at them.
Yeeeah.