HP creates Halo effect for videoconferencing

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camera to project and zoom in on physical products on a table. Although HP is marketing the product to have "no perceived latency," a slight transmission delay was apparent during a live demonstration with HP executives in London.

DreamWorks has 10 such rooms spread across its offices in California, England and Hong Kong, and is looking to set up similar sites in its new studios in Taiwan and India. The first test Halo room was up and running in March 2003.

Estimated to cost $550,000 each if implemented on a modest scale, Halo rooms are outside the reach of smaller businesses. However, the rooms are available under a 48-month payment scheme, in which companies fork out $30,000 per month. HP also offers payment plans for 36 months and 60 months.

According to HP, the network and service for each room will likely cost $18,000 per month, depending on local telecommunications charges in the various countries.

The company is exploring possibilities of offering Halo in varying room configurations and will soon provide support for connection between multiple Halo rooms. Currently, people can only communicate between two Halo sites.

HP has 13 Halo rooms set up across its offices worldwide, including Spain, Israel and Singapore. Videoconferences between its research and development teams in Singapore and Barcelona now frequently take place in the respective Halo rooms, said Ken Crangle, HP's general manager for Halo.

"We can now meet more often and for shorter times," he said. The company is expecting a 26 percent increase in the use of Halo rooms across HP in 2006, he added.

According to a study by Wainhouse Research released in October, enterprises spend an average 12 hours per month using traditional videoconferencing equipment. Among Halo customers, which currently include chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices and food and beverage company PepsiCo, this figure increases to 131 hours, Crangle said.

AMD has two Halo rooms in the United States, one in Austin, Texas, and one in Sunnyvale, Calif., and plans to expand the system to Europe and Asia, said Hector Ruiz, AMD's chief executive. "We've been able to cut down on executive travel, and we are able to have impromptu meetings with colleagues located miles away."

HP and DreamWorks share the revenue from the sale of Halo, which falls under HP's imaging and printing group.

Eileen Yu of ZDNet Asia reported from New York.

[Mr Twain]

Wah?

"It can create realistic collaborative interaction through a color-calibrated visual experience, a key differentiator compared with traditional products, the company said".

Those whacky PR guys... I think that mean's people can see each other on high definition plasma screens in a room, and no one else has done that yet.

[ccisat1dxj]

Awesome

Let's get the cost of this down! Corporate America can use this in many areas.

[RodrigoCastilloDiaz]

Well, this information was very interesting because we can see how much technologies have grown and increased since its beginning in aspects like this one. The videoconference helps people to talk and see throughout the world in a cheap and useful way because almost everyone can access internet and a videoconferencing system is cheap and you can instal it to any computer. In this summary we can see that videoconferenca can be used for a lot of this. Not just talking to another person. Maybe in the future we would even be able to work, and do all our daily life though a computer like the halo rooms.

[soph-olivares]

i believe this is a very useful thing, it will make many things easier, like you won`t need to travel to get to a meating but it also has its bad part, like it will make us like robots or like you won`t have to travel for a meeting, but you won`t know the culture, environment, etc of a place.

[angelfernandoinfotech51]

Well, its kind of interesting to see that new techs as this one are now being put onto service. This ¨Halo¨technology of videoconferencing seems to be useful and shows us that a new breed of business communication options are being born. Businesses neeed this kind of methods nowadays for a quicker communication for plan and business problems sharing.

Having your people or your own boss talking to you from a plasma screen with super HD characteristics sounds quite interesting, but at the same time the use of this new method of videoconferencing enhances the experience and makes it even more interactive than it normally is.

Anyway, with the useful and important advance of this tech we can now assure ourselves that sooner or later holographs will be sour new method of communication in civil and business ways. Thats it.