Thursday July 24, 2008
Halo Experience
I’ve used several teleconference systems before to have meetings with clients all over the world. But none of them compared to the very cool experience of using the HP Halo system I enjoyed at a client this morning. This system has been available for several years, but this was my first experience using it. The picture above doesn’t do justice to 1) how easy it was to use and 2) the “real presence” feeling it provides. Even though we were talking to people in Chicago (we’re in Dallas) it felt like we were in the same room. I think part of what makes this happen is the tight control over the color and scale of each Halo room.
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Mark Kraemer
Mark is an Information Architect and Principal Consultant at EMC in Dallas. His professional life is a Venn diagram, where he lives in the intersection of the folks who wear suits and the designers who wear flip-flops. You can catch his other ramblings on user experience and design at his personal blog, Mark-up.
Level with us, here. Were you looking into their eyes, or were you looking at their foreheads?
Near the end of the meeting, I noticed that we were looking at each other’s foreheads, but not so much that it was a distraction. The general feel was that we were in the same room. Only there at the end did it feel like we all had a weird tick.
Although I admittedly had a bad experience in that room for another reason, I distinctly remember not liking the interface. My problems were that 1) it was so close to reality that it actually threw me off a bit and 2) it was too hard to make eye contact with both the remote participants in front of me and the local partipants on each side of me.