Telepresence and Tomorrow's Road Warrior
by
Randy Mears
Good telepresence solutions do exist so why is the adoption and proliferation of this alternative to travel so slow to take hold? In one of my blog articles, I discussed some of the advancements in telepresence and my own experience with a solution called Teleportec (a very good solution that is now over six years old). In that article, I expressed my belief that the success of telepresence for remote conferencing really depended on camera placement, high definition life-sized images with smooth video and well coordinated high fidelity sound (perfect lip synchronization is a must). Those were the technical challenges, and they seem to have been solved fairly well over the past several years. I didn’t really focus on cost or culture, but I probably should have.
Although I have seen some evidence of activity on the high end of the cost scale, affordable solutions (the kind that would translate into rapid adoption) haven’t yet appeared. Certainly potential money savings through decreased travel should have had a significant impact on the acceptance, demand and proliferation of telepresence, but it continues to gain market very slowly. It will apparently take more than good technology and defrayable costs for telepresence to make drastic changes to our meeting habits.
MSNBC’s Practical Futurist, in an optimistic article about the future telepresence, sees adoption coming as a result of the currently unfolding zeitgeist. With cultural factors like global climate change potentially inhibiting travel and a youthful net savvy replacement workforce that is comfortable with cyber-communication, the article makes a good point. Even so, it is difficult to nail down a time-frame.
I’m not exactly part of a youthful workforce, but I do see the appeal in decreasing my time spent traveling, particularly when it comes to typical and frequent "face to face for an hour but travel all day" meetings. I remain puzzled that there isn’t more of a telepresence push considering what a time and money saver it could be.
