Now that I've worked from home for a few months, I’ve got to say that telecommuting is both a miracle…and an opportunity for innovation that, believe it or not, is going to make connecting remotely even better.
The miracle is, well, miraculous. My home and its devices are a textbook example of computing “at the edge” of the networks, and I’ve engaged with customers, partners, and the teams in our research centers around the world via phone or videoconference. Our conversations have been interactive, just like they should be, and sometimes surprisingly so: at a pre-scheduled townhall last week, not only was my image projected on a large screen so people could see me gesturing as I stood in my home office, but I could read their body language and reach out to them to elicit their reactions in real-time.
They didn’t miss me because I was “there.”
Likewise, like many others, I've stayed connected to family and friends using the range of connectivity tools, from Skype to Facetime and Zoom, and discovered that seeing people as we talk is much like being in the same room with them.
Only not quite. Such "virtual" engagement isn't a complete or nuanced replacement for being in those rooms together, and here's where I see the opportunity for innovation. I predict we're going to see a huge amount of development in making the experience of connecting remotely more complete, nuanced, and reliable.
Here's a brief overview of the three areas in which I think we'll see breakthroughs:
First, presence. Conference calls on speaker phones with participants focused on TV or computer screens can present a clipped and limiting version of reality, almost as if the technology decides what you will hear or see; the voices and images don’t always synch-up the conversation so that all participants are equally present, for instance.
This makes it harder for us to feel like we're truly "in" the experience, as we risk missing the subtleties that make it real, such as being able to notice the expressions of participants who aren’t speaking, and seeing the body gestures of those who are. In the real world, you control your perspective on any conversation, not a technology platform.
But technology can help remedy this sense of separation by creating a more robust and fluid immersive environment where more of the computing is done locally, instead of only using distantly located servers to crunch all of the data. This development trend is called "Edge Compute," and is already being used to make devices in homes and offices operate faster while doing more things. So, it's not a huge leap of faith to imagine remote conversations that are more immersive as, say, videogames, in which players control what they see and do simply by pointing (and have visibility of their surroundings, not just the objects on which they're focused).
Second, locality. It’s not enough to provide participants with a 360-degree visual perspective of space where they're meeting; sounds and imagery need to be placed in specific places in that geophysical space, much as they would be in a real-world dialogue, so people need to be positioned spatially around you and the voices from those positioned “near” you heard at higher volumes than those from afar.
The technology already exists to deliver such refined audio positioning and it’s being used in high-end entertainment sound systems, utilizing a larger array of speakers and controlling software that parses sounds to, say, put explosions on the "side" of the room in which they're occurring when you're watching a movie. But this is just the beginning: video positioning suggests holography (3-D representation), which is finding new currency in our culture through tours of artists’ avatars who appear in “live” concerts. I expect there will be much work done to make this rendering realistic, especially close-up.
But there could be other solutions; for instance, I’m struck by how personal text messaging can feel even without any visual cues (emojis notwithstanding). Perhaps the next gen of remote conferencing could rely on other inputs as stand-ins for visuals, such as detailed readings on participants’ expressions and movement. Again, technologies like Ultra Wideband (“UWB”) could provide the mechanism to not just provide detailed feedback on physical positioning without visuals but also give participants more ways to interact with their conversations (hand gestures could be actionable triggers, for instance).
I think the days of staring at a speaker console in the middle of a conference room table are going to end sooner versus later.
Third, reliability. Getting dropped from a conference call is a common experience, as is trying to speak over another participant (or getting spoken over therefrom). Video calls get jumpy and can lag. Image resolution can vary.
If the real-world were as unreliable, we’d get a lot less done.
There are a number of connectivity solutions that present a step-change opportunity for conferencing, such as WiFi 6 (which is available today and able to juggle multiple devices, like additional cameras or speakers) and, in the near future, 5G, which can provide a quicker connection to the cloud.
We will explore novel ways to capture and perhaps cache conversations so, for instance, certain “canned” responses are triggered when nuanced feedback isn’t necessary (think audio/visual emojis?), so some of the easiest interactions are preprogrammed much in the same way certain responses require on a click when you text. Taking this idea further, there are opportunities for AI to become de facto participants in conference calls and video chats, helping participants make communication more efficient, maybe serving as referees or translators that streamline conversations.
Imagine a lengthy back-and-forth and then the AI player saying, “It sounds like you’re saying XYZ and agreeing, so let’s move to the next point.” Making remote meeting experiences better could have as much to do with making the actual discussions more effective, not just making connectivity more efficient.
I continue to be hopeful that we will all be back to normal - but it will be a new normal, and I'm certain that the lessons we've learned from it will be with us for years to come. While I'll continue to enjoy and rely on tools that allow for remote connectivity, I think the innovation and development prompted by our recent experiences will continue, too.
