On Telepresence
Despite what the travel industry wants, telepresence is going to keep taking off. Why? It makes business sense. It’s cheaper (flights, hotels, expense accounts), its more effective (meetings in six cities in one day), and its empowering (work from anywhere). Over the next generation, this is going to become commonplace.
In the meanwhile, there’s an institutional/enterprise push to integrate this into existing offices. Autodesk for example, is using 20 telepresence suites (a combination of table, lighting, mics, cameras and big screens) to cut its travel by 16%. These are expensive (hundreds of thousands).
The atomization of this has already begun. To wit – the Vgo below:
Not sold that an office consisting of remote controlled segways-with screens is the form this will take. Why? The point of telepresence is to defeat the requirement of an office, not populate it with ghosts.
If we continue down the atomization path, we find distributed clients with extremely high quality video, sound, and monitors with built in mics/sound etc. Like Cisco’s umi. (Note, long run is a feature, not a standalone product. Roku, Apple TV, Kinect etc.) In the end, Skype or GChat Video.
So, I for one, am not worried about the nodes for this global telepresence network. The real vulnerability, however, is bandwidth.
Even assuming compression technology keeps pace with the fidelity of these set ups, demand is going to zoom, and bandwidth providers will have to keep up. Given the net neutrality debacle, I’m not optimistic when it comes to relying on existing providers to adapt to the future.
Indeed, if they were to pursue their current strategy of artificial cost increases and delayed infrastructure rollout, they could push the horizon back on telepresence penetration.
-Shlok
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