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They're ready for me when I arrive. As I enter the conference room, they look up and greet me. There are introductions. But in place of handshakes there are waves -- because the five Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) engineers sitting across the table are actually across the country, in Corvallis, Ore. I'm seeing them on three enormous plasma TV screens, mounted end-to-end on an office wall in Midtown Manhattan.
My side of the screen is a mirror image of theirs: the same wooden half-arc conference table, Aeron chairs, beige fabric, and shaded wall sconces. They're 3,000 miles away, but for all practical purposes, we're in the same room -- even if acknowledging that reality requires suspending disbelief.
"BEING TOGETHER." While most videoconferencing technology -- and for that matter, phones, e-mail, planes, trains, and automobiles -- attempts to connect two places, the Halo Collaboration Studio, developed by HP and DreamWorks Animation (DWA), insists that two places can become one.
"Because the space is a common space in terms of its design, it eliminates the distance, it eliminates the barriers between us from an architectural point of view. I'm not looking at your place, and you're not looking at my place -- it's us now being together in the same space," explains Mark Gorzynski, HP's chief scientist for Halo. The result isn't an improvement in videoconferencing, but a complete shift: the nearly seamless melding of a half-virtual, half-physical space.
Halo began when Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, wanted to be in two places at once. Following the success of Shrek, the animation studio's 2001 blockbuster, DreamWorks Animation set the goal of producing two feature films each year -- requiring work to be divided between its two California studios 350 miles apart, in Glendale near Los Angeles and in Silicon Valley's Redwood City.
"We found ourselves putting people on planes a lot, and ultimately it was just getting everybody cranky and tired," recalls Ed Leonard, chief technology officer at DreamWorks Animation.
"NO COMPROMISES." Since they knew a little something about communicating via the screen, DreamWorks figured there must be a better way. Drawing on its experience with video technology and creative work environments, DreamWorks created several prototype rooms, before partnering with HP, which leveraged its expertise in imaging, enterprise-class networking, and service-based products.
After three years of tuning, HP brought the Halo room to market in December -- priced at $550,000 to install and $18,000 a month to run. (There's no per-use charge.) "We've made no compromises," says Halo General Manager Ken Crangle, acknowledging the high cost, almost 10 times that of other high-end conferencing systems, such as Polycom's VSX 8000.
Halo's innovations are both architectural and technological. Three high-definition screens are fed by professional-grade cameras, whose data is pushed through a specially designed, proprietary network around the world in less than 200 milliseconds -- fast enough that your boss can interrupt you. Carefully tuned broadcast-quality audio makes it easy to have more than one simultaneous conversation across the table.
GREAT DETAIL. A fourth "collaboration" screen can show PowerPoint presentations or the feed from an additional camera aimed at an illuminated square on the table to show models or prototypes. Using an interface created by Frog Design, a powerful zoom can be directed to come in close enough to count pores on the back of a hand or the imprint on a circuit board.
But Halo isn't about pointing a camera at someone and showing them on the screen, says Crangle. "We wanted to create something where people just meet and forget that they're in two separate rooms." Like a regular old conference room, Halo rooms don't come with mute buttons. If you have something private to say, you have to step outside. And an auditing process ensures that conversations in a Halo room cannot be recorded as they cross the network.
Architecturally, rather than accept the differences between locations, the Halo room is designed to smooth them over. In the process, it's a step away from how architecture has been conceived for thousands of years. Rather than existing in a specific place, the half-physical half-virtual Halo room exists in space. With the Halo room, architecture itself becomes a communications technology.
MORE TALK, LESS TRAVEL. The Holy Grail is what Crangle and his team call "Halo moments," when people forget they're in two separate locations. "Our door will open up, and you'll look toward your door, or somebody will be fiddling with their PC's plug, and someone on the other side will try and help them," he says.
For the Halo room's customers -- which so far include PepsiCo (PEP), AMD (AMD), Procter & Gamble (PG), and Novartis (NVS), in addition to DreamWorks and HP -- the no-less-modest goal is minimizing the need to travel. Rather than queue up issues for face-to-face meetings, the Halo room allows for more frequent collaboration, not only to reduce travel costs but to increase productivity.
DreamWorks' Leonard says he now spends 30% of his week in one of his company's Halo rooms, including a custom large-format, auditorium-like room used for storyboard meetings, and special remote video-editing suites. Scheduling has become tense.
CLOSE AND PERSONAL. Since the rooms are "always on," HP hasn't been able to resist pushing the boundaries of the social connection they can provide. Teams at HP's campuses in Corvallis and Rehovat, Israel, held a joint baby shower. And before Halo R&D manager Bill Wickes' daughter, a grad student at University of Southern California, was married, the family minister performed her mandatory premarital counseling between the Halo rooms in Corvallis and at DreamWorks' Glendale studio.
"In one part of my brain I knew they weren't sitting in the room with me, but after the first couple of minutes your brain just adjusts, and you behave as if you're in the same room," recalls Reverend Elizabeth Oettinger, senior minister of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Corvallis. "I was able to watch them interact with each other, and all of those kinds of visual and emotional and body-language cues that are so important when you're conducting a personal conversation were there, and real."
But if Halo works as a convincing virtual reality, it does so by very carefully constraining the reality it's communicating. Big table legs keep people in the cameras' sweet spots -- lest they "disappear" in the seams between screens. The room's deliberately bland design aids the illusion. So while it may take a fairly significant suspension of disbelief to imagine yourself in virtual reality's more common scenarios -- careening through the streets of Gotham, playing golf, having sex -- creating a believable beige conference room, it turns out, is far easier.
Blum is a contributing editor to BusinessWeek Online in New York
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