Meeting face to face with 8,475 miles/ 13,637 km between us

I have been doing business with global companies for many years and remember the excitement of the early days of the built-in conference room video systems. I always thought video conferencing was helpful to touch base with clients or internal colleagues at other locations- seeing someone speak was worth the effort of setting those systems up (yeah you know it, they never worked without getting the local IT person involved!). In today's world with Skype or web-enabled screen sharing/video sharing technologies, many meetings have a certain element of 'seeing' the other attendees at a very low cost so many of us settle for using them to get that extra interaction in our meetings.

If you read my profile in this month's 'Faces' column in EContent magazine you know that some of my favorite work days are when i am on-site with clients drilling down on requirements. So tie an on-site with using cool technology and there was no doubt that i would truly enjoy my meeting this afternoon.

Thanks to HPs Halo telepresence system, 8,475 miles / 13,637 km didn't stop me from having a frank and honest discussion- and honestly it felt pretty close to having the other person in the room while sitting in one of the HP Halo conference rooms.

It did take a bit to get 'used to it' (mostly because i was interested in the setup, camera angles etc) but the things i liked the best were:

• that there was no image of myself (or the others in the room) on the screens which i always find distracting.
• the person was presented 'life-size'
• eye contact and verbal cues were easy to read just like if a person was in the room
• within a very short time, i forgot about the 'technology' and was just having a conversion
  

We didn't share any screens or presentations so i would be interested in seeing what that experience is like. The good thing is that we agree to do more meetings using Halo going forward, which is quite alright with me!