Long Distance Intimacy...

This story was told in a story circle at the Learning History workshop in February 2008. 

A new generation Video Conferencing system is so realistic that one user sometimes tries to reach under a table 3000 miles away! The impacts for reducing business-related air-travel are very real for at least one corporate employee as well as his colleagues.

Long Distance Intimacy

a story from the 'Breaking the Mould' story circle

So, I am afraid I can’t do a Local Authority one so I am going to do a corporate one but I hope its relevance in some ways.

So, there has been a lot of talk about video-conferencing and the use of it to reduce travel. And I remember quite early on my career that I took part in a video conference and it was a painful experience. It was kind of a five pixel person on the other end, who would talk 3 minutes after I said something to them. And so, I actively avoided video-conferencing after that because of that deeply painful experience.              

Then, just a year ago a new system was installed and I thought  well I will give it a go – I’ll just give it a go. And it was phenomenal, you really felt like you are looking through a pane of glass at the person even though they are somewhere else in the world – in the US or Asia. I have heard stories about people—one person would drop a pen and the other person would reach under the table and try to pick it up, it was so realistic!        

And it was quite an incredible experience and as a result of that I have manage to avoid—my work requires me to have a lot of contact with the US - and last year I manage to avoid any trips to the US by replacing them with this high-tech video-conferencing solution. I am not sure other people who have been quite ruthless in their traveling planning as I was but certainly other people have made a lot of use of it. So, it has had a fairly substantial impact in terms of our organization’s aviation carbon footprint, and we are going to experiment on how much further we can take it.

Another interesting story about it is …..whereas the older video-conferencing would barely ever get used, this one is so well used that it is very difficult to get slots. By the time they wake up in States, right through to when people can no longer bear being in the office in the UK, it’s being used. And because it is fully booked up it is very difficult to get slots on. It shows that it is clearly being successful and what the impact is on people’s behavior in terms of air-travel reduction being not clear yet. But I believe that, certainly in my case, it has been positive and it has been for other people as well. 

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Comments

[Susan]

I'd love to know which system this is and how much it costs. I have been using webex with my clients in Mexico but want to investigate other systems to avoid flying.

[Chris Preist]

Information on the system is at:

http://www.hp.com/halo/introducing.html

and

http://h20330.www2.hp.com/enterprise/cache/570006-0-0-0-121.html

Price is definitely corporate top-end - but it is being made available for rental through a deployment in Marriott hotels.

[Mike Yearworth]

I found out about this system fairly early on and started to cut out air travel. The biggest success was booking the systems for the best part of two whole days between 4 sites (3 US 1 UK) and then running a workshop. It removedthe need for ~12 people to fly to a mutually convenient location in the US.