HP Halo videoconferencing experience

(note: as always with my blog, the opinions expressed are mine and mine alone)

HP has done a wonderful job of carefully engineering the entire user experience.  The experience was very close to a live, in-person meeting.  I'd go so far as to say that Halo is closer to a live meeting than it is to traditional videoconferencing.  We had 10 people in 4 different locations on 2 continents making eye contact over IP. 

The IP-purist in me still wants a solution over an open, multi-application IP network, but I sure appreciated the ability to talk to people thousands of miles away as if they were across the table.  And of course it is still the brilliance of the architectural precepts behind the Internet that enable this solution.    I can't go into all the details due to our NDA with HP, but a few other generic comments:

• Minimizing latency, like for VoIP, is absolutely critical.  However, the video helps compensate for any latency induced voice issues.  Video is not quite as sensitive to latency as voice.  I think for a few reasons: our eyes/brain can make up for visual imperfections better than our ears/brain can for speech imperfections; our ears are more sensitive to these imperfections; and a few damaged words hurt the user experience much more than a few damaged pixels (e.g. an imperfect picture doesn't cause me to start talking while you are finishing your sentence, but voice delay can cause this).  Not that we had much of an issue with latency in this case - certainly never any worse than many mobile phone calls - but physics means it will be more of an issue when going across the Pacific, so squeezing out every bit of latency in encoding, buffering, packetization, serialization, transmission, hardware (cameras etc) will always be a huge part of the engineering work.
• Multi-national, Fortune 100 companies will adopt this type of technology from HP and any other vendor that delivers this quality.  They will get the ROI from reducing travel budgets and from increasing inter-location communication effectiveness.  For more widespread adoption, multi-tenant, time-share infrastructure type models will need to evolve, and overall price points will need to come down.  I think we'll get both over time.
• This is game changer technology.  It adds the visual dimension of person-to-person communications to the written and spoken dimensions that have already largely transcended distance and geography (thanks to Internet adoption).  It won't change the game for some time - the technology has room to grow, and obviously technology itself doesn't change the game without adoption.  But this is an exciting start.