Input: TELEPRESENCE
Immerse yourself
In A vIrtuAl
get-together
Immersive telepresence – multi-location virtual meetings the board were able to attend and provide their input. In this case
which make geographically displaced people believe they it was only a few people, but it could easily have been many, many
are in the same room - is so good, you’ll forget it’s there, more.
says Nortel’s Mike Brennan. In this article he reveals some
of the interesting and unusual benefits the company has Essentially, Nortel is seeing immersive telepresence become the
seen from using the technology itself during the last year. arena for a multitude of innovative, collaborative communications, J<IM@:<J$GFN<I<;K<C<GI<J<E:<
which go beyond those originally anticipated.
A
t Nortel, we’ve been using our own immersive telepresence
technology since the beginning of 2007. Now of course Is this actually real?
you’d expect this, but I’ve been at Nortel for many years,
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and I’m seeing an excitement about it that I’ve never quite seen Of course, part of the reason for this is because it’s so realistic;
with any other Nortel technology. much more so than most people expect. Indeed, I experienced
the power of this illusion first-hand, during a recent demonstration
People seem to be magnetically attracted to it. When we built our of the technology to a group of analysts in Toronto.
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room in Frankfurt, for example, twenty or thirty people would stop
)
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by each day, just to see how the build was going. Four or five of us started a morning session in the Toronto
telepresence room, with five or six of our colleagues in a room
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This level of interest means we’re already using it for a variety of in North Carolina. Everyone relaxed into it, and the meeting was
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internal Nortel events – many of which you wouldn’t expect. going very well. We decided to break for lunch, and got half way
down the stairs when a colleague of mine started to run back up,
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Recovering lost time saying “we forgot to tell the others which restaurant we’re going
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to.” She had totally forgotten that we were talking with people in F=EFKK8B@E>KFK?<JB@<JN@CC9<=<CK =8I8N8P=IFDK?<D<<K@E>IFFDJ%
The Nortel leadership forum, for instance, is usually hosted another country.
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somewhere remote and relaxing, giving our CEO and the whole
board the chance to fly away for a few days. But this year, they It’s this “immersive” nature of telepresence – this trick that it plays
decided to use immersive telepresence. The entire activity was on your mind – that makes it more than just a useful tool for
conducted virtually, and even extended to other members of the enhanced productivity. Certainly, Nortel’s CxOs are all fascinated
company as an HD video conference. by it. Many of them had false expectations based on dated video
conferencing technology which was riddled with bugs and blips.
There was no doubt that this was far more successful than normal, But after five or ten minutes in an immersive telepresence room,
not least because it saved time for some of our busiest and most they seem to forget that there’s any technology in use at all.
valuable personnel – even though you might think they’d be keen
on a trip on company expenses. Most people at this level tend to This is partly because they can truly see all of those non-verbal
say something like ‘sure, it would have been fun, but I’ve just spent cues; people’s body language, facial expressions, all the nudging
six weeks on the road, and I haven’t seen my wife and kids in and elbowing. The audio is crisp in the room, to the point that
months’. Immersive telepresence simply helps them regain some you can hear someone whispering at the back. There’s more
of that valuable time that’s normally eaten up by work. comradery and commenting, without it being flavourless. Basically,
everyone starts to act naturally. And that makes the experience so
What’s more, because the technology integrates with voice, video, valuable that these CxOs no longer have to be with each other in
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audio conferencing and many other tools besides, people outside person in order to do their jobs.
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ecoexecutive | 40
NORTEL.indd 40 18/4/08 15:49:18
LOVEMRM • 0413_ECOEXEC_297X210_UK
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