Press 1 for the Wow
If you run a doctor’s office, pharmacy, chain store, corner store or just about any business that has been around long enough to have a telephone, you know there are certain questions people ask over and over again.
“What are your hours?”
“Where are you located?”
“What’s your fax number?”
Eventually, you get so tired of answering the same questions that you install an automated attendant. “Thank you for calling. Press 1 for our address and hours. Press 2 for our fax number. Press 3 if you actually want to speak to a human being and are willing to prove your determination by navigating another seven menus.”
I am starting to think I need one of those for immersive videoconferencing.
“Thank you for calling David. Press 1 to hear why an amazing immersive video experience does not automatically make a good meeting room. Press 2 to hear why we learned this twenty years ago. Press 3 if you are about to show me another astonishing demonstration involving two people staring lovingly into each other’s eyes through several hundred thousand pixels.”
Because here we go again.
On September 23, Google announced a significant expansion of Google Beam, the technology that began life as Project Starline and is now commercially available through HP as HP Dimension with Google Beam. Beam is expanding beyond the United States into Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan, supported by 18 channel partners. Google is also working with Industrious to make Beam rooms bookable in selected shared-workspace locations beginning in October.
I have absolutely no doubt that when people experience it, many of them will say the same thing people have been saying about technologies like this for decades: Wow. And they should.
Google Beam is technically impressive. The person on the other end appears life-size and three-dimensional. Eye contact works. Body language feels natural. Spatial audio helps reinforce the illusion that the other person is sitting across from you rather than being rendered by a collection of cameras, displays, processors, cloud services and software. Google has research showing improvements in measures including connection, comprehension and follow-up meetings. HP talks about recruiting, coaching, customer conversations and other interactions where personal presence matters. Those are perfectly reasonable use cases.
The problem is not whether the technology works. The problem is whether the work works around the technology.
And that is the question we apparently need to keep pressing 1 to hear again.
We Have Seen This Movie Before
Nearly twenty years ago, immersive telepresence was going to change business communication forever, and for a while I was right in the middle of it.
When I was in the financial services industry in the mid-2000s, what began for us as a four-system proof of concept eventually grew to just under 200 TelePresence systems in roughly two years, creating what at the time became the largest commercial immersive TelePresence ecosystem outside of the manufacturer.
The experience was spectacular. Walk into one of those rooms, sit at the table, and the people at the other end appeared to be sitting across from you at another section of the same table. The room designs matched. The displays were aligned. The cameras were positioned to maintain eye contact. The audio came from the appropriate location.
Wow.
And then somebody wanted to invite someone who wasn’t sitting in another identical immersive room. Or somebody wanted to bring in a conventional conference room. Or use a desktop. Or hold a town hall. Or do just about anything other than sit there and admire the illusion.
That was when things became complicated.
We spent enormous amounts of effort making those environments interoperable with desktops, conventional video rooms, executive appliances, and other collaboration systems. We worked on business-to-business connectivity through ungodly expensive exchanges, created support processes, and used the systems for global meetings and town halls. We essentially spent years trying to overcome the fact that the most beautiful collaboration environment we had ever deployed had been designed around an extraordinarily narrow collaboration scenario.
Immersive telepresence was not bad technology. It was fantastic technology. It was simply too specialized to become the universal model its early excitement suggested it might become.
There is a very important difference.
Humans Ruin Everything
The problem is humans. We refuse to behave the way immersive collaboration demonstrations want us to behave.
A demonstration usually goes something like this: two people sit across from one another. They make eye contact. They converse. They nod. They gesture. Someone says it feels exactly like being there.
That’s wonderful.
Unfortunately, five minutes later an actual employee walks in and says, “Can Janet join us?” Janet is at home. Then somebody says, “Let’s pull up the forecast.” Somebody else says, “Can we look at the presentation?” Then it’s, “Can you play the new commercial?” Followed by, “We need Steve from Legal.” And finally, “Wait, I want to show you what the customer sent me.”
Welcome to a meeting.
Google has done a better job accommodating some of this than the immersive systems of the past. Beam can share content during a 3D Google Meet session while keeping the other person life-size on the display. But even there, presentation requires Companion Mode, and some presentation functions are restricted. Shared content audio, for example, is not supported. More significantly, Beam’s full 3D experience is still fundamentally a connection between two Beam-equipped rooms. Add another participant conventionally and the session shifts back to a standard meeting.
And there it is. Press 1.
The exceptional experience depends on maintaining the exceptional circumstances.
Wow Is Not a Collaboration Strategy
We saw another version of this a few years ago with Logitech’s Project Ghost. Project Ghost was created with Steelcase to produce a much more natural one-on-one video conversation. The concept ultimately evolved into Steelcase Ocular View. Once again, the idea was to make remote interaction feel less like videoconferencing and more like sitting across from another human being. Have you heard much about its extraordinary success in the real world? Me neither.
It was clever. It was attractive. It generated lots of attention. And it reinforced the same lesson.
There will always be circumstances in which an extraordinary one-on-one experience has value: executive conversations, counseling, recruiting, high-value client meetings, medical consultations and coaching. Google and HP cite many of those same scenarios for Beam.
But even those examples become more complicated when we let actual humans participate.
Imagine a physician using Beam to speak with a patient. The eye contact and personal connection might be terrific. Then the physician wants to bring in a specialist, look at an MRI or compare a previous scan.
Imagine a recruiter interviewing a candidate. Seeing body language naturally could be genuinely valuable. Then another interviewer joins, the conversation moves to a portfolio, or everyone starts discussing a document.
Imagine two executives conducting a sensitive conversation. Excellent Beam application.
Then the CFO needs to join.
Press 1.
Actually, forget pressing 1 for a moment. Let me tell you what happens next, because we have seen this movie many times before.
You bring in the content. You bring in the extra people. You accommodate the remote participant who does not happen to be sitting in another identical $25,000-plus room. And, in many cases, it all works. The meeting continues. Two or three or six people are talking. Some are remote. Somebody is sharing a spreadsheet or a presentation. The technology does what it is supposed to do.
And then one day, somewhere, an executive looks at the room and asks a very reasonable question:
“Why are we spending this kind of money on a system that is now producing basically the same experience I can get on my desk for free?”
That is the moment when the house of cards starts to collapse.
The specialized system has gradually been adapted to behave more and more like an ordinary collaboration system, because ordinary collaboration is what actual humans needed it to do. But once it behaves like an ordinary collaboration system, somebody eventually notices that they paid extraordinary money for it.
Suddenly, the emperor has no clothes.
The room that was justified by its unique immersive experience is now being used for ordinary video meetings, ordinary content sharing, and ordinary multi-person calls. At that point, the question stops being, “Isn’t this amazing?” and becomes, “Why exactly do we still have this?”
Then comes the final insult. The organization spends another large amount of money removing the ultra-specialized systems it spent a large amount of money installing, replacing them with less expensive, more flexible rooms that can handle the way people actually work. The integrator that installed it, and is now being paid to remove or modify it, gets paid twice. Some integrators have privately told me they fully expect that install-now, modify-or-remove-later cycle with systems like these.
They know it, and I know it, because we have watched this cycle many times before. Install the magic. Adapt the magic so people can actually use it. Discover that adapting it has made it considerably less magical. Then pay to remove the magic.
Press 1.
None of this makes Beam useless. It means organizations need to be very careful about confusing an impressive experience with an important infrastructure investment.
The hardware required has been publicly priced at roughly $25,000, with the software license purchased separately, along with installation and the physical space required to deploy it. Google requires Beam licenses for every Beam device, and full 3D calls require Beam equipment at both endpoints.
That is a substantial investment for an ultra-narrow interaction, not to mention the cost of the real estate that must be dedicated to this one specialized purpose.
A normal meeting room, meanwhile, can accommodate two people, ten people, remote people, local people, slides, spreadsheets, whiteboards, videos, brainstorming, training and whatever insanity someone decides to introduce five minutes after the meeting begins. It may not produce the same breathtaking illusion of presence, but it works. It also works as a room where people can simply sit down and talk face to face without involving technology at all – something these highly specialized rooms can never really support.
That last one is not a big deal, you say? Fine. Then you be the one to tell the executive that a meeting room is available to book, but it can’t be used for the five-person conversation they’re planning to have. You’ll learn soon enough how big a deal that actually is.
The Lesson We Keep Forgetting
This is why the newest Beam announcement produces mixed feelings for me. I love technology like this. I want people pushing the boundaries of what visual communication can accomplish. I want better eye contact, better dimensionality, better spatial audio and better ways for people separated by thousands of miles to feel emotionally closer.
Google Beam represents some genuinely remarkable engineering. But remarkable engineering and scalable collaboration strategy are two different things.
The industry keeps falling in love with recreating the physical meeting so perfectly that we forget what physical meetings actually are.
Human communication is not simply two perfectly framed people maintaining eye contact. We have props. We have documents. We have interruptions. We have groups. We change direction. We improvise. We bring chaos.
Truly great collaboration systems embrace that chaos. The ultra-specialized ones ask humans to behave unnaturally so the technology can remain magical. Sorry, that doesn’t scale.
That is why, after more than four decades in this industry, I remain skeptical whenever somebody shows me another breathtaking recreation of two people sitting across from one another and tells me I am looking at the future of meetings.
Maybe I am. But I’ve seen that future before, and it was astonishing then too.
And if you’d like to hear why it eventually ended up being ripped out of thousands of rooms around the world – at a significant cost – please press 1.