Brainstorming on possible uses for TelePresence beyond business mtgs - join in!

[Laura Douglas]

TelePresence is widely used for business meetings but with budgets cut and severe travel limitations that thinking is quickly expanding to other possible uses. 

When you starting thinking about it, there are some pretty exciting possibilities like:

• Virtual lobby attendants
• Remote interviewing
• HR benefits support
• Financial applications like virtual trading windows and remote bank branch specialists
• Virtual arraignment and deposition
• Remote expert consultants for retail stores
• Face-to-face customer service and support

Do you think these are possible uses?  Any other ones you want to add?

Laura

Your Collaboration Community Manager

[gmcgill]

All good applications but full acceptance my require more telemetry. Are we setting up a situation similar to polygraphs? It seems that some psychopaths can easily fool a polygraph. I have no doubt that a comfortable chair with discreet sensors could be deployed but that would most certainly be a violation of personal rights. But until that time, I hate to think that parole hearings may be conducted via telepresence!

It may be interesting to conduct an experiment with Secret Service agents interviewing 'suspects' via telepresence versus in direct contact. They may be the best trained interveiwers out there. They depend on dozens of micro expressions so, if they can read all the micro expressions over telepresence, I will be impressed.

And that gets to the power of DSP chips. When will voice streess analysis be another option applied to the voice stream?

Oh, it is a dark and stormy afternoon here - perhaps it is bleeding over to my posts.

[lapowers]

Haha...I love it, Greg!  A voice stress analyzer (ahem...lie detector) could be valuable in many circumstances including job interviews, call center interactions and HR-related situations.  Although I'm wondering if both parties would have to be notified in advance that the technology was being used -- could that create a privacy or legal issue?  Possibly.  Regardless, it's an interesting thing to ponder.

Personally, my favorite use of TelePresence outside of the traditional "business" environment is connecting families of soldiers with their loved ones who are stationed in other countries.  These people are separated from their families for months (sometimes years), and it's cool to see them connect face-to-face using a Hi-Def experience that makes it feel like your loved one is simply sitting across the table from you.  To me, that's priceless.

[ketucker]

A few use cases come to mind:

• While HealthPresence presents some unique challenges and necessitates customization, using TelePresence for mental health consultations could be a game changer for rural locations and other un/underserved communities.  Not every mental health session involves the proverbial couch treatment.

• Use TelePresence with the major news outlets to allow for CEOs and CFOs to walk into their own TelePresence room for their next appearance on CNBC or MSNBC.  Skip the satellite uplink rental or trip to the local network news affiliate and just have both parties join a B2B Exchange for transport. 
  

• Translation services for retail pharmacy locations, including TDD capabilities

• Remote auditions for singers, actors, reality television show contestants.  My girlfriend is an opera singer and routinely gets on a plane to fly to New York for a single, eight minute audition.  She could save two days and $1,200 every time by using TelePresence and the opera companies could have an entire world of talent available, not just those with the means to self-fund audition trips. 

• This last one might sound like a joke, but what about signing up some online dating behemoth like match.com or eHarmony for "have a coffee date on us" type interactions for those people who are not proximal to one another, yet show up as "matching" one another.  Getting to know someone over phone and e-mail is spotty at best.  I think that you could expedite the "dating qualification process" by having a few short chats via TelePresence.  People take the plunge and hop on a plane to fly halfway across the country to "meet" someone for the first time, and not all of those meetings go as well as the parties anticipate.  If using TelePresence could save those people some heartache and trouble, it would easily be worth it.  People also couldn't lie about their appearance or post eight year old, 26-pounds-ago photos of themselves.  It seems like a win/win to me.

[dadawes]

How about setting up telepresence at trade shows to allow remote presentation while avoiding travel? For trade shows related to the technology it becomes a good way to show off the technology, while making it easier for people to present without having to travel to the trade show.

Flipping it around the other way, we could use video feeds from the show, piping them into our local telepresence rooms. I'm not sure what the trade show organizers would think of that, though: would remote attendees have to pay to attend remotely?

[Adam Stauffer]

Always good for use in TV advertising like "The Unit" or "24"

[sundarar1]

It would be interesting to look at Telepresence as a basic infrastructure service enabling Customer, Supplier, vendor/partner related Collaborative Applications that span a complete gamut of internet enabled devices. From a call center to a rich INTERACTIVE application built today, we can find various Use Cases for "Telepresence".

The Virtual Collaboration platform and portals can be even considered "Packaged" Services that applications can leverage. As all organizations are busy in Virtualization, adopting SaaS and experimenting on the "Cloud", it becomes much more basic/fundamental to address "Telepresence".

Regards

Sundar Ramanathan

[carson1]

-Education and Training

[philew]

I would consider the company I work for a Power User of Video. We currently have over 700 video codecs globally . I manage 82  codecs and each codec averages 4 hours of calls per day.

Here are some of the other uses I have currently seen:

1. Virtual Attending training seminar to reduce travel.

2. HR Policy rollout to large audience. Key was to have same messege broadcast to 18 locations simultaneous.

3. Problem review of parts not fitting together properly.

4. Problem review of assembly operations prior to full production.  (items 3-4 saved 100 engineers travelling for 4 weeks)

5. Record training  sessions and then post on intranet for people unable to attend or future use.

6. We do  remote interview utilizing video codecs at Kinko's, we have also performed legal reviews between our company and another.

Most of our large rooms with video conferencing have document cameras, VCR/DVD player/recorders integrated and we utilize H.239 sharing documents when possible. Deskcams are being reviewed for Helpdesk personalization while assisting customers.