It’s video-conferencing, Jim, but not as we know it
It’s video-conferencing, Jim, but not as we know it
Gerard Knapp spends time in a HP Halo studio and comes away mightily impressed but leaves wondering who still gets the short straw of the unholy early start.
The great thing about tele-conferences is that you can talk to more than one person at the same time. This is particularly useful if those other parties are not in the same city, or state, or even continent. Indeed, tele-conferences invariably involve people in different countries, and that means time-zones.
In other words, 3pm in Sydney is 5am in Paris (but at least it’s the same day) while it’s 11pm on the previous day in New York. Do the participants all share the pain, or are the most accommodating times allocated on heirarchy?
Well, such considerations are secondary when you’re the boss. Even if a big IT firm like Hewlett Packard did go one better and bring Star Trek-style ‘transporter’ technology to market, people would still have to get up very early, or stay up very late, to meet with the CEO during business hours, especially if the top dog was half a world away.
Apparently, this is what happens when the CEO of Australia’s largest corporation, BHP Billiton’s Chip Goodyear, hosts a session inside one of HP’s new Halo ‘Collaboration Studios’. These are dedicated facilities built by HP inside the corporate HQ that contain almost as much hardware as a regional television station, but with faster data rates.
At a recent Halo press demonstration at HP headquarters in Palo Alto, an American HP executive said, “well, he’s the boss, so I guess that answers your question as to who gets up early” when Chip calls the troops into their respective Halo rooms.
Indeed, Chip’s underlings could hardly afford to even look a little sleepy during these ‘virtual meetings’ or ‘collaboration sessions’ - the word ‘video-conferencing’ was not encouraged at this press function. Thank you for your cooperation – because the Halo technology would make their weariness quite apparent to the mining company boss.
That’s because the images of his fellow executives on the widescreen - high-resolution plasma display panels inside the Halo studio - would be sharp and life-size, the audio clear and static-free, and most importantly, the latency between those Halo studios around the world would be minimal. There’d be no way to retract anything dumb before the boss hears it, because he’s pretty much hearing it at the same time.
This is not like Tony Jones on Lateline waiting two seconds for a meaningful answer from his increasingly crabby interview subjects in the ABC’s Washington studio, who’ve invariably been woken up at an early hour to answer his pointed questions. Rather, Halo makes it like the person is in the same room.
And this is the key to Halo - the minimal latency inside the studios means it is possible to hold meaningful discussions. Executives can hold real meetings and make real decisions. The room has a high-definition camera that can zoom in on small objects – like packaged goods – or render images as small as newsprint.
All Halo rooms are consistent in both look and operation, and each Halo studio is built by HP engineers, and costs the tidy sum of US$475K for the base model (yes, that’s almost half-a-mill).
They are identically-equipped with the same cameras, microphones and even furniture. Apparently HP and its design partner on this project, Hollywood ‘s Dreamworks SKG, tested 236 colours just for the interiors.
It took some prodding to get a real latency figure from HP executives; they spun the “it’s in virtual real-time” line, which is, of course, impossible. But the fourth executive I asked finally admitted it was the equivalent of (in video terms) around one or two-frames-per second; in other words, probably about five to 10 hundreds of a second.
Minimising latency the key
This is not to seem overly critical of HP for spinning PR nonsense – why say ‘virtual real-time’ when it’s not? – because the engineering behind Halo is designed to allow natural human interaction; rather than humans having to adapt to the regular video-conferencing delays of up to two seconds.
Halo’s chief scientist Mark Gorzyski said studies had shown that humans can only tolerate slight latency to maintain their understanding or appreciation of what is being shared, told or even performed. One of the most sensitive areas is in music collaboration, where the maximum latency is 20-30 milliseconds, while one-to-one conversation can tolerate up to 200 milliseconds.
“We had to build technology to address the minimum latency for human interaction,” he said.
It is that latter figure that drove the engineering behind Halo, as working to a <200 millisecond delay for voice, pictures and data is beyond what most television broadcasters work around every day of the week.
To do this, HP leased a clutch of optical fibre circuits from “a variety of telcos” to provide each studio with up to 45 Mbps bandwidth, and up to four Halo studios can be inter-connected at one time for a meeting that can be held across four different locations. (So far, HP has installed or is in the process of building, some 61 Halo studios around the world, and boasts a blue-chip client list spanning a variety of markets.)
But the bandwidth was only part of the issue; HP also had to build the dedicated hardware to allow the high-speed, full-duplex transfer of all this data, and all this is encapsulated in – wait for this acronym – HVEN, the Halo Video Exchange Network. This is actually custom-built switching kit sitting on permanently leased lines that shares no other traffic with any other party – except Halo studios.
And broaching that sensitive topic, HP said it does not offer recording facilities for any Halo meetings.
Of course, that kind of bandwidth costs real money – like US$18,000 per month per studio, or the equivalent of two first-class airfares on Qantas from Sydney to Los Angeles.
The business case
The HP executives in Palo Alto stressed it was not really savings in travel and accommodation that will be the business driver for Halo studios. To be sure, there are real savings to be made, but perhaps not enough to cover Halo’s not insignificant set-up and running costs.
Rather, it’s more to do with keeping highly-paid executives in the one place and improving the speed of product and business development. A common justification in Palo Alto was, ‘Why travel for a day for a one hour meeting?’, and it’s a worthwhile claim, especially when those meetings are among people from within the same company, all working on the same project.
As mentioned previously, HP’s design partner in the Halo project was Dreamworks SKG, the Hollywood studio of major animation projects like Shrek and Chicken Run. The genesis of Halo came from the frustration felt by CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was fed up with logging hundreds of hours in air-travel as he went from SKG’s two studios in California, to the Aardman Studio in the UK (the claymation specialists behind Chicken Run).
It is these benefits to the CEO and other senior executives that can’t be under-estimated, as greater job satisfaction is important, even for the CEO, who also probably wants to be home on a Saturday to take the kids to soccer.
In time, there will be a trickle-down effect, in that Halo-style studios may become more affordable (such as a two-screen room), and HP will most likely set up ‘rent-a-Halo’ operations in major centres to be used by those companies that can’t justify the outlay. The typical operating cost for a Halo would be around US$230 per hour for a room that is used up to 200 hours per month (not including amortisation of the room itself). An all-inclusive cost is closer to US$1000 per hour.
While significant, these costs are puny compared to typical executive remuneration in many corporations. Indeed, access to a Halo studio could become a regular condition on employment contracts for senior executives, such is its ability to cut down on international travel.
But still, of all those ‘collaboration sessions’ taking place across the globe, somebody still has to get up early. Like Garrett Gargan, the somewhat bleary-eyed HP executive who hauled himself into HP’s Singapore Halo studio to take part in the press demonstration that linked up Halo studios in London, New York, Palo Alto and Singapore.
While his fellow HP executives looked chirpy and alert, Gargan cut a lonely figure, sitting alone at 2.45am in his Halo studio (the other HP executive listed to be with him wasn’t there – probably slept in), with half-empty bottles of Coke and Gatorade on his desk.
Interestingly, in all of its studies, HP had not looked at this very apparent reality for every global business – managing the consciousness of staff when conducting these sessions across multiple time-zones. But as Gargan admitted, studying the effect of time differences on productivity “would be beneficial”.
Each Halo collaboration studio ‘starts at’ at US$425,000 and then there are the not-insignificant monthly bandwidth costs.
To get connected, an organization needs to buy two Halo studios to allow the end-to-end sessions. The aim is to make it like all the participants are in the one room, and to do that, the vastly-reduced latency of communication from one studio to the other – and another two can be connected for four-way meetings – makes it stand apart from other video-conferencing offerings.
HP describes it as ‘real-time’, but there is a small yet almost imperceptible delay. Each studio can accommodate up to six people in the front row –seated at a long desk – with up to six people in the back-row. Each studio measures 6.4 metres wide by 5.1 metres deep and participants face a wall containing three plasma display panels that show the people in the other studio, displayed in life-size images.
Given that DreamWorks SKG collaborated on the design, the studios feature high-quality audio, video and furnishings, even down to the choice of colours. The studios also have a high-resolution camera that allows users to focus in on small objects, and even display newsprint.
The first user of a Halo studio was the film production company, but now current users range from PepsiCo through to AMD, with Australia’s BHP Billiton also on the user list.
How is Halo perceived? This offering is something of a return to form for HP, a company that was always more about engineering than PR. But in recent years, the headlines have mainly centered on its high-profile CEO, the Compaq merger and most recently, scandal. But Halo shows the depth of resources within the company. This expensive, complex offering shows that it still has the engineering ability and client list to build – and sell - a complex, expensive piece of technology that can elicit a ‘gee whiz’ response. And this is not to say it’s come up with a white elephant. At the time of writing, it was working on building the 61st such Halo studio for one of its blue-chip clients.