A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of accompanying my colleagues Lesley Dickson and Katie Barrowman to the Cisco offices in Eurocentral. John Connell and Jim Buchan had arranged for us to take part in a conferencing session with their colleagues in Bangalore and New Delhi, who are in the process of establishing a digital network for education there.
There was a slight twist though. Instead of more traditional conferencing solutions such as video conferencing or web conferencing, we were introduced to ‘Telepresence‘ and I have to say, it was quite an astonishing experience. We entered what looked like a regular conference room with an oval table with big puffy chairs to sit in. In between each pair of chairs was a desk microphone with a simple on/off switch. One half of the conference table seemed to be cut short, and behind it instead of chairs were three large 60″ LCD/Plasma (I’m not sure which) panels. In the middle of the oval table, the vanity panel looked like some kind of white fabric. It seemed odd to have a vanity panel when no one would be ’seated’ at the other side of the table, but I was told by John Connell that this panel is used to project your computer screen onto, which he promptly demonstrated whilst we waited for the conference to begin. Aside from a telephone on the desk and a corporate ‘Cisco – Scotland’ plaque on the wall, the room was empty of anything else. We sat and waited.
The screens came to life, and I heard the collective intake of breath from my colleagues and I. We were facing John and Jim’s colleagues from Bangalore in full HD – which, through ingenious use of half desks and camera angles, to all intents and purposes looked as though they were seated at the other side of the desk from us. Most video conferencing has some issues around frame rates or slight delays in the transmission, but this was absolutely remarkable – no noticable delay at all. We were then joined by colleagues in New Dehli and the conversation kicked off.
For around an hour, we talked about our experiences with Glow, what our issues to uptake have been, and what interesting things we have seen in the use of Glow in Scottish classrooms. What interested me most was the variety of user experience we were giving from around the country. Whilst it’s easy to turn attention to big events where the previously impossible was made possible, the greatest use of Glow is not the big events but the regular, day in day out storage of documents and sharing of information. It never ceases to amaze me that the best feature for most people isn’t something like web conferencing, but the simple ability to share documents or news – simplicity can’t be underestimated.
Many of the technicalities go over the top of my head, but suffice to say that Telepresence is High Definition conferencing with no latency – something that regular users of traditional video or web conferencing would kill for. Previously, people have had to figure out how to work around issues of latency, but with TelePresence this just isn’t an issue – it felt like the most natural kind of conversation. All too often, we end up working around the problems of technology, or the inherent shortcomings in it’s use. With Telepresence, the results are quite astounding. I’m told it requires a network capable of delivering 5MB up and down stream in order to cope with the bandwidth required for a Telepresence session, so it probably isn’t coming to most locations in the immediate future – but it’s not that far off. It’s web conferencing Jim, but not as we know it.
Could this be used in education? I could see brilliant application of it in situations of one to one tuition where either distance or specialism is an issue, and brilliant home school links for those far from home attending school. Also, I could see great use of it in bringing specialists into the classroom. Much as I like web conferencing, there has always been the issue of quality of sound and video – it looks like pretty soon that’s going to be a thing of the past.
My thanks to John and Jim for giving us this experience of new technology.
imagecredit: JohnConnell.
