This week you may have noticed in the media that I did a presentation to a business audience in Adelaide. In the scheme of things, that is not particularly unusual for me. What was abnormal was that even though I appeared live in Adelaide, seemingly in person, I did not leave Melbourne. I did this using a holographic technique from a company called Musion Systems.
The question you are no doubt asking is why did we do this? After all, we do not expect the populace at large to be flashing around the country as holograms any time “real soon”, although I must confess the productivity that I gained by not spending half my day travelling was most welcome.
The answer is 2-fold. First we seem to have a significant number of digital sceptics, the people who, as the kids would say, “don’t get it”. For these people we are lighting a beacon on the hill to show them that there is much more to the telecoms revolution than simply seeing grainy Youtube videos on the Internet today. The Musion technique uses a high definition video channel to carry the signals and this requires high speed networks.
Even more important, is that this holographic technique can be considered to be an example of a class of systems called “telepresence”. Now, in Telstra, we use telepresence on a daily basis. We have a number of rooms kitted out with multiple high definition screens and cameras. When connected via the network, these systems give you the genuine look and feel of being in the same room – you get full eye contact, immersive sound and high definition visuals of the people you are interacting with. It is so realistic that a colleague of mine in Melbourne was in a meeting with a group of people in Sydney and one of them got up and walked out of the room. My colleague wanted to have a private conversation with this person, so he got up and walked outside to speak to him and only remembered when he left the room that there were in different cities. Since we have installed these telepresence systems they have saved Telstra many hours of lost productivity and much cost on travel.
The lesson here is that the journey of telecommunications does not end until the day we can deliver an experience which is exactly the same as being in the same room as the people you are communicating with – wherever they are. As I said, it is a journey and we have a long way to travel. Do not be misled by those who tell we have already reached the destination.
The second reason we did this demonstration was to show that Telstra today has the high powered networks that will deliver the services of the future. The Musion Systems hologram only requires 1 high definition video channel. A room-sized telepresence system requires at least 3 high definition video channels plus a high speed data channel (to share documents, etc). Being able to deliver such signals to wherever they are needed across this vast land, requires a network of extraordinary power and depth and demonstrations such as this prove that we have it.
My final word: having been ‘beamed’ into the future, I like it. It beats being stuck in traffic, standing in airport queues and being told to switch off my laptop for half of the flight to Adelaide.