Professional Documents
Culture Documents
www.HumanProductivityLab.com
November 2011
This Human Productivity Lab Research Brief has been sponsored by Array Telepresence
Table Of
Contents
3. 4. 4. 5.
Background and history Return on investment What makes a Telepresence environment highly immersive Most important components of creating immersive environments 5. Wide horizontal seamless displays 6. Absence of visible cameras 7. Absence of screen bezels 7. Stand-Up environment 8. Eye contact and eye lines 9. Augmented reality 9. High definition video with high frame rate 10. Frame rate 10. Life sized images 10. Engineered environments 10. Lighting 11. Audio
Human Productivity Lab Research Briefs provide insight into telepresence and visual collaboration technologies for both business line managers and IT professionals. Our principals, analysts, and Board of Advisors have real world experience in designing, implementing, and managing telepresence and visual collaboration solutions in organizations ranging from Fortune 100 to Small and Medium Businesses The Human Productivity Lab works with both organizations looking to implement telepresence and visual collaboration and vendors looking to improve their offerings and communicate complicated technologies to sophisticated audiences. Our flagship publications the Telepresense Options website, the monthly Telepresence Options Telegraph, and the Bi-Yearly Telepresence Options Magazine represent the largest identifiable audience in the world interested in telepresence and visual collaboration technologies. You can follow Telepresence Options on Facebook, Twittter, RSS, and get our articles emailed directly. Our industry association on LinkedIn, Telepresence Industry Professionals, is now over 2475+ telepresence industry pros and our German language group Telepresence Industry Professionals on Xing is over 260+
Future of highly immersive environments Interim solutions SurroundPresence About the Author & Human Productivity Lab
My short definition of telepresence conferencing is Visual collaboration solutions that address the human factors of participants and attempt to replicate, as closely as possible, an in-person experience. Highly Immersive Telepresence is a sub-set of telepresence. The father of immersive telepresence conferencing is TeleSuite (now the Polycom RPX) developer Herold Williams, the first visual collaboration architect to significantly address the human factors of the visual experience, hide the technology and integrate it into a format that would create immersion. The Result: usage went through the roof. While traditional videoconferencing systems averaged 515 hours per endpoint per month, TeleSuite systems were averaging 60, 70, 80, even 100+ hours per system per month! By focusing on the human factors of participants and creating a highly immersive experience, Herold had tremendously improved the end users acceptance and preference over what could be achieved by a traditional, observant videoconferencing experience alone.
An early TeleSuite Enterprise 408 Telepresence Environment Circa 2004. Herold Williams sits center, to the right of Scott Allen, now CEO of telepresence managed service provider Iformata Communication
Early adopters included AOL, Cigna, 3COM, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, GlaxoSmithKline and Capital One, who proved that enterprises would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for visual collaboration solutions that met their needs. Polycom bought the TeleSuite intellectual property and manufacturing capabilities for over $50 million in 2007. Renamed the Polycom RPX, the offering has gone on to be one of the most successful visual collaboration solutions in history. Hundreds of Polycom RPX systems are deployed globally, ranging from $299,999 for a four-seat environment to over $700,000 for a 28-seat environment.
November 2011 p.3
By greatly improving end-user acceptance, highly immersive telepresence dramatically increases usage, ROI and customer satisfaction over traditional videoconferencing. In surveys, employees consistently say they prefer the more humanistic, natural experience that highly immersive environments provide over traditional videoconferencing. They like the life-size body language and non-verbal cues that come across so clearly from remote participants, and how the comfortable environments let their meetings go longer without fatigue. Remote participants are represented more faithfully in the local space and are included in discussions as equal participants. They use the systems more willingly, without mandates. As a result, they travel less and produce more, giving organizations a time-to-market advantage from accelerated decision making, faster merger and acquisition, more flexible business models, and improved personal productivity of individual executives that can be more effectively leveraged around the world at the speed of light.
In telepresence and visual collaboration immersion is best thought of as a continuum where the graduations are not noticeably different from their adjacencies, although the ends or extremes are very different from each other. The more elements you address, the greater the immersion you achieve.
November 2011 p.4
The most important components of creating immersive environments include the following:
Wide horizontal seamless displays to address humans wide horizontal field of view and peripheral vision
Peripheral vision is the part of vision that occurs outside the center of gaze (or foveal vision), providing the brain a sense of context and space in support of foveal vision. Human beings have fairly narrow vertical field of view, about 135 degrees, and a much wider horizontal field of view of about 200 degrees.
Visualization of the vertical vs. horizontal field of view and visual overview of the eye.
Prev
Using a wide horizontal seamless display, telepresence architects can better immerse participants in the remote scene by duplicating the usual and expected visual cues of peripheral vision.
The Polycom RPX 400 Series uses a 16' x 4' wide format display to supplement participants' peripheral vision and a hidden eye-level camera
DVEs telepresence solutions use seamless beam splitters to eliminate the visible bezel. Polycoms RPX uses a rear projection screen.
The Digital Video Enterprises Huddle 70 eliminates the bezel, hides the camera at eye-level and replicates architectural cues where possible. Note the placement of the plant in both locations.
Stand-Up Environment
Nothing destroys an immersive experience faster than headless participants. Traditional videoconferencing rooms (and many telepresence group systems) cant capture participants standing to enter, leave, stretch, make a point, or use a whiteboard.
The author standing in a DVE Immersion Room with a 120-inch seamless beam splitter and a hidden eye-level camera behind it.
November 2011 p.7
Eye-contact is chief among the bodys non-verbal cues. From infancy, we are biologically drawn to the gaze of our parents, establishing a preference for personal communication that continues throughout life. Eye contact between humans is physiologically powerful, eliciting changes in blood pressure and heart rate and increasing brain activity. The information transmitted through eye contact is rich and varied: Eye gaze provides many communication fundamentals, including feedback, conversational regulation (turn taking) and the expressions that punctuate emotion. Mutual eye gaze has been described by psychologists as the key to the awareness of the thoughts of another. People with strong eye contact are perceived to be more honest, attractive and successful. Conversely, psychologists call people with poor eye contact gaze-avoidant personalities, rated less favorably in the eyes of others.
Significant gaze-angle differential using standard cameras mounted over flat panel displays makes participants appear to look down.
Augmented Reality
Another powerful technique to create a sense of immersion is augmented reality, which layers virtual images into a physical space to create the illusion that participants are in the same physical space. Digital Video Enterprises and TelePresence Tech use beam-splitter displays and an extreme low reflectance black velour background to achieve this effect. The black background turns invisible as it absorbs light. With no visible background as a frame of reference, the remote participants appear as volumetric images layered into physical space with the right proportions.
The TelePresence Tech TPT 4000 layers virtual images of remote conferees into the physical space of the local environment while hiding the camera at eye-level.
Frame rate
Frame rate is the frequency which a videoconferencing system produces unique consecutive images known as frames. The higher the frame rate, the smoother and more realistic the motion. The current standard for most videoconferencing systems is 30 frames per second (fps), though a significant percentage of newer systems are capable of 60fps.
In this picture of a TeleSuite circa 2004, you can see all the elements of an engineered environment: participants are properly lit and precisely positioned for video capture, the furniture and architectural elements are mirrored on both sides, including attaching the table to the screen to create the illusion that both sides share the same table and physical space.
Lighting
Lighting has and will always be critical to creating immersive environments even with advances in sensor and camera technology. Low lighting will always add noise to the imagetoo much will add glare and washout parts of the scene. Direct overhead light will cast a shadow over the brow, darkening the eyes. Proper lighting includes key, fill, and back lighting. A balance of all three is critical with a subtlety of an office environment so it doesnt look and feel like a television studio.
November 2011 p.10
Audio
Prev
Accurate voice capture is the most important aspect of telepresence, yet it often gets the least attention. Reverberation is the real killer. You can have the greatest audio compression and algorithms, but a lousy voice capture and poor replication are hard to overcome. Microphones Much of the problem boils down to microphone placement where is the microphone in relation to the source voice. Lapel microphones achieve the best possible quality. Using todays technology requires micing up, which has problems with naturalness, battery life, capacity and recharge. Steering microphone arrays are in the works. Because immersive rooms can become pretty active, table microphones can be problematic for standing participants. That leaves multiple overhead placements as the best option. This requires a high-quality DSP mixer, preferably with a de-reverberation algorithm. Spatial Acoustics Another aspect of highly immersive environments is faithfully replicating the direction from which sound is produced. If a remote participant on the left-hand side of the screen speaks, the sound should come from that direction to effectively mimic an in-person experience. Acoustics Good acoustics lower reverberation. Immersive environments use acoustical materials to absorb sound and keep it from reflecting off the ceiling, walls and floor.
Cisco TelePresence did a product placement of its vision for the future in the 2009 movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, in which photorealistic 3D representations of remote participants were projected into physical space.
Interim Solutions
Until photo-realistic 3D avatars are a reality, Herold Williams is at it again His company, Array Telepresence, has filed patents on a number of new technologies that capture and process the images pre-compression and has designed the SurroundPresence telepresence environment to optimize the effect. SurroundPresence uses many of the techniques listed above: high-definition life-size images, wide format seamless screens, hidden eye-line camera, stand up presentation and an engineered environment that addresses acoustics, positioning, and lighting among other factors. The big difference is Herold has found a way to deliver the experience at 1/3 the cost of competing highly immersive solutions with an environment that only requires a 13 x 19 room a fraction of the space required from competing highly immersive environments. Herolds patent-pending optical and image pre-processing technology, Equal-i, can also improve the experience of any visual collaboration session done in a room with an elongated table with or without the other aspects of the SurroundPresence environment. This problem was succinctly summed up by Ciscos Chuck Stucki at the Wainhouse Research 2010 Summit, highlighting the challenge of a typical boardroom configuration: How can manufacturers and installers solve the problem of supplying high-quality video, where facial gestures are clearly visible, across a long boardroom table? Assuming that the design of boardrooms is not going to change, then the equipment serving it will have to. One solution is cameras with zoom facilities, but what is not without its problems who will control the zoom, for example, and what happens if two people speak at once?
The Equal-i system brings the farthest participants in a conference with an elongated board room table up close and personal (without pan/tilt/ zoom cameras) and distributes them across either a wideformat seamless screen or a standard flat panel monitor. This can help improve the conference experience of organizations that have nonnegotiable space or furniture constraints like $100,000 mahogany board room tables. Williams is currently looking for a distribution partner to help take his products to market by the time he showcases SurroundPresence and Equal-i at InfoComm 2012. Info@ArrayTelepresence.com
The SurroundPresence SP-8 environment is optimized for the Equal-i system to create a highly immersive meeting experience for up to eight participants. The environment incorporates all of the techniques for creating high immersion: wide-format screen that takes up significant peripheral vision, high-definition, life-size remote participants, hidden eye-level camera, stand up presentation, and an engineered environment with optimum lighting, acoustics, and architecture. SurroundPresence is also unique in that it doubles as a conventional conference room (albeit with enhanced data collaboration capabilities) and can be deployed at 1/3 the cost and a fraction of the space required from other highly immersive telepresence environments.
Prev
Table of Contents