What Is Telepresence?

Telepresence as a concept has been around for many years and can be applied to a large number of applications. From virtual dining-room applications in which people are made to feel that they are sharing a meal at the same table together, to mystical “beam me up, Scotty” scenarios, such as projecting a presenter onto a stage using holographic projection technologies so the presenter appears to be standing on stage in front of the audience. Any immersive application that makes one person feel as though another person is physically present in their environment with them can be called telepresence. Wikipedia.org defines telepresence as “a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance that they were present, or to have an effect, at a location other than their true location.” Although these types of applications are “cool,” their usefulness has so far been isolated to niche markets, one-off events, or to futuristic research studies.

However, there is one application in particular in which telepresence has found a viable market: the business meeting. In today’s global economic climate, companies are hungry for technologies that enable them to communicate with their customers, partners, and employees more frequently and more effectively. They want to speed their decision-making processes, allowing geographically separated groups to collaborate more effectively together on projects, increasing intimacy with their customers, and lowering their costs of doing business. Business travel is at an all-time high, yet traveling is expensive, time-consuming, and takes a toll on people’s bodies and personal lives.

However, the market is skeptical of video technologies that promise to deliver these benefits. For years the video conferencing industry has promised that it would replace the need for face-to-face meetings and lower travel costs, but for the vast majority of companies that have deployed it, video conferencing has for the most part failed to deliver on those promises. Video conferencing has struggled for years with complicated user interfaces, lack of integrated scheduling, and in many cases poor video quality. These issues have directly impacted overall utilization rates and caused major skepticism about the true value of video’s use as a communications tool.

Many people refer to telepresence as high-end video conferencing, or the “next generation” of video conferencing. Many people categorize any video conferencing system that provides high-definition video and wideband audio as telepresence, but in reality telepresence is its own unique video technology. Telepresence is much more than just high-definition video and wideband audio. Providing a true telepresence experience requires attention to details overlooked in most video conferencing environments. Later in this chapter, video conferencing and telepresence will be compared highlighting the difference in the two technologies.