Virtual Meeting

Over spring break I visited San Francisco, CA and had the opportunity to visit reputable companies in the Silicon Valley. One such company was Cisco Systems. They are at the forefront of video conferencing, where they have developed meeting rooms with audio systems, plasma screens, and video cameras to simulate a board-room meeting, yet with counterparts in remote locations. They called their system “Telepresence.”

Although the package costs $300,000 USD to buy, it would serve large corporations very well, as they could gain huge cost savings from having managers being able to save time and money from traveling to far off locations for meetings. I was able to experience the video conferencing where fellow students were placed in separate meeting rooms. The desk, seating 10 people, were equipped with speakers and microphones. They were three cameras placed in different directions and three plasma screens next to each other, to create the platform. It worked surprisingly well and you could make eye contact with people across the screen.

You can watch a video about it from YouTube:



Video taken from www.youtube.com and provided by Cisco Systems

The disadvantage of such a live and realistic video-conferencing solution, was that you know if a person is not paying attention if they are reading emails, checking their blackberries etc, which you would not know over teleconferencing. In some ways, the meetings are too real and too transparent.

Also in some ways, it cannot overcome face-to-face meetings because you lose the personal touch, there is less trust and camaraderie and it cannot go that extra distance to close the gap. For example, we met a secretary through a plasma screen, and he looked very real. We did not realize he was on TV, until we came closer, as he could see us through video and therefore we could interact with him. It was a very funny experience. However, while on the tour of the Cisco building, we met him on the second floor, and he physically looked very different and seemed more approachable.

There are huge advantages to virtual teams and using the web to conduct meetings, which can create convenience, with possible time and cost reductions. However, for certain meetings such as meeting new clients, face-to-face contact may still be necessary to build trust.