Why Tele/Presence - Tele/Conferencing Has Failed For More Than Thirty Years

This piece is in response to another article where the authors naively discussed telepresence technology and fundamentally not understanding the issue.

As the author of the first book on Teleconferencing in 1985 when earlier AT&T PicturePhone Meeting Service was promoted on national television and hundreds of millions were spent by corporations on video teleconferencing. It failed then and is still failing. Back then, Arco spent $17 million on "immersion video" rooms and network to name one example. Immersion is not new, it's been tried by all kinds of companies. I have seen these rooms, AT&T's, the Intercontinental Hotels spent $2M on two rooms in London and New York - it was like the bridge on "Star Trek" and these are just a few examples. The issue is that you can't take your "room" with you. You can't take the room to the problem - look at the BP spill, Katrina, Afghanistan, etc. And, "you" may not look like Brad Pitt or Demi Moore either.

To drive this point home, Hal Josephson said 30 years ago and will again speak at our Tele/Presence Forum Expo (http://presenceforum.com) said, "if you are boring face-to-face, you will still be boring via video conference." The point if you don't get it is that most presenters have little training on presentations and just because you are the boss, doesn't mean you know how to engage an audience or keep their attention. As Hal says, it requires "tele-skills."
Why teleconferencing has also failed is because it's not just full-motion video, its low-high resolution still-frame, audio-graphic and a myriad of other forms. Even the ill-fated "electronic blackboard" had its practical uses.

My two sayings are "focus on the problem, not the person." This reflects the fact that most video conferences are with people who have meet each other face-to-face and you don't need to show faces for an effective meeting, hence why audio conferences are so popular. This also means that the reason for most meetings is to discuss a problem which may not always but in the room such as parts manufacturing, hospital operating rooms, etc.

The other "green" saying is, "move minds, not matter." That is, traveling for most internal meetings really makes no sense at all and you "don't have to take off your shoes," get stuck inline, have to lug around anything, go to the meeting in your pajamas and so on.

You can call it anything you like, however, until there are fundamental shifts in really training users in teleskills, focusing on problems-not people, making it portable and a myriad of others, teleconferencing will still be a failing, not a succeeding concept.