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Posts Tagged ‘telepresence’
Whitepaper provides unconventional perspective on “videoconferencing”
I have released a brief whitepaper summarizing my contrary position with respect to “videoconferencing”. The paper is titled: Practical Applications of Low-cost Network-Based Video: Beyond Videoconferencing as a Substitute for Face-To-Face and is available at the following link: http://www.toyz.org/whitepapers/video_social2009.html
This paper was originally written in 2003 but I was not able to publish until now, for various reasons. But I stand by the research and conclusions.
Some of the more controversial positions include:
The present work totally abandons video as a substitute for face-to-face communication, and in fact suggests uses that are not videoconferencing, in any existing sense, at all. Further, we conclude that another common application of videoconferencing, that implemented by most desktop software, specifically the person-to-person video call, is nearly void of utility, particularly for business communications.
Please look it over and flame away.
More unconventional video wisdom
Tsahi Levent-Levi at the TMC Talking Video blog refers to my recent post on video in which he says:
Andrew MacDonald tried to see what’s his perceived audio quality threshold. He shows that improving audio quality improves the medium and the cues it provides.
Ok, no problem. Many years of research bear this out. Audio quality has a direct impact on the effectiveness of interactions. But then Tsahi takes a leap:
Video adds visual cues which are not available in voice calls. And high definition video gives more visual cues than its SD counterpart.
This is where the research does not support Tsahi’s assertion. Video can add visual cues, but not the ones people expect and assume. Further, audio provides more non-verbal cues than is usually assumed.
Ten years ago, Steve Whittaker at ATT research looked at research going back many years prior to that, and found:
We first evaluate evidence for the utility of providing non-verbal communication information using video. We conclude that previous work has overestimated the importance of supplying non-verbal information at the expense of speech.
And nothing has changed today. There is still way too much assumed about the value of non-verbal communication potential in video. People put way too much focus on this and, therefore, neglect other, much more effective, uses of video, such as for presence, shared context, and its role in facilitating opportunistic interactions.
Furthermore, while we often overestimate the value of video providing non-verbal cues, we also tend to under-estimate the degree to which audio provides non-verbal cues. Other research cited in the above paper has shown this to be true as well:
The research (Chapanis) compared two media conditions: audio only communication, and high quality video/audio. If video does indeed provide useful cognitive cues, then there should be benefits for providing visual information in these types of collaborative problem solving tasks, where it is important to track the understanding and attention of remote participants. However, the studies showed that adding visual information did not increase the efficiency of problem solving, or produce higher quality problem solving.
We humans tend to assume that video must provided these non-verbal cues. It’s so intuitive and obvious. But when one looks at it objectively, again and again, the data proves otherwise.
It’s easy to say video does provide such cues, casually. No one would question it, unless they’ve looked at the years and years of research.
We should note that Mr. Levent-Levi works at RADVISION, a company that makes video-conferencing products. They need to go where the money is – and that’s in people beating the 20-year long dead horse of “talking heads” video as a substitute for face to face meetings – not in far more effective, but less sexy, uses of video.
Not so startling Cisco research on video
A tweet from Dina Mehta via Mark Petrovic pointed me to an article titled The psychology of videoconferencing that refers to some research Cisco recently released. Cisco says:
[research published in 1971] revealed that only seven per cent of our understanding comes from pure words, and that 40 per cent is gleaned from the tone of the voice and 53 per cent from visual cues.
What they fail to note is that all the research has shown that video is not very good at providing those “visual cues” especially more subtle ones.
For many years, videoconferencing technologies have been applied as a substitute for face-to-face meetings. Spending for videoconferencing technology is typically based on a presumed increased productivity or savings due to a presumed reduction in travel. Despite countless deployments and projects deployed over decades, on the whole, the technology has failed to provide these anticipated benefits.
When videoconferencing has failed to meet expectations, it has almost always been attributed to some “other” factors. There seems to be a powerful intuitive desire in people to find something else to blame. I was guilty of this myself, for a long time. We keep telling ourselves some detail of the implementation needs improvement. If we just used a better camera here, a little more bandwidth there, an improved user-interface, one more update of some kind, all will be well.
However, the answer is right there in prior research. We will find that many others before us had fallen into the same trap. And it’s not because these projects were using old hardware. There have been some deployments using absurdly expensive hardware and software that would never be practical in a wide deployment. And even such sophisticated systems could not deliver on the presumed power of videoconferencing technologies to substitute for face-to-face communications. It wasn’t the hardware or network. The most expensive hardware in the world can’t address some of the fundamental limitations of real-time videoconferencing.
The elephant in the room is that even high quality audio and video cannot replicate the rich nature of face-to-face communication. Period.
Further, experience shows that this is very very difficult for people to accept. It is much easier to find something else to blame. We tend to point at problems in the details of the specific implementation rather than accept the reality that real-time videoconferencing is inherently limiting and then work within those limitations.
In Cisco’s paper, they say:
“We observed the value of visual cues in successful meetings, and video technologies that maximise this, such as telepresence, are ideal for maintaining excellent relationships.
“However, individuals who approach meetings with a positive attitude, leaders who understand and support the different personalities and cultures in their teams, and organisations that provide the resources and training to make video communications the norm, are also essential to effective video-enabled meetings.”
So what they’re saying is when the technology doesn’t work, or doesn’t give all the benefits people expect (because it never does), it’s your fault because you failed to “understand and support the different personalities and cultures in your teams.” Nice preemptive scapegoat, Cisco.
Videoconferencing predictions past and present
This week we’ve seen many references to “recently released” research suggesting that videoconferencing may finally be ready to take off.
Videoconferencing – a much talked about, but seldom-used technology – may finally be earning its spurs within the enterprise.
85 per cent of respondents polled either use or plan to use video conferencing.
Forty one per cent of those questioned are also using, or investigating the use of so-called telepresence
But here’s the thing: We’ve seen this before. For example:
“Videoconferencing gains momentum”
Jul 18, 2007“Video Conferencing Gains Ground”
Sep 17, 2007“Videoconferencing is likely to gain momentum”
Apr 4, 2007“Videoconferencing Gains Momentum”
Sep 7, 2001
Despite years of false starts and unfulfilled promises, here we go again. Whether we are talking one year ago, seven years ago, or 25 years ago, the theme is always the same. It goes like this: “while we acknowledge that videoconferencing has never met adoption expectations in the past, we believe that is because of INSERT EXCUSE HERE and with our new INSERT WIZBANG TECHNOLOGY DIFFERENCE HERE we are sure adoption will explode this time.”
Hint – it’s not a technology problem.
FYI: Telepresence is not “new”
Cisco is pushing Telepresence hard as “the next big thing” and a lot of people are buying into the hype and referring to it in language like “new” and “next generation” technology.
I have news for you. Telepresence has been around for decades, at least in research circles. It used to be called Videoconferencing and it is usually justified on the basis of increased productivity or cost-cutting as a direct result of a presumed reduction in travel. Except it turns out it doesn’t achieve those benefits.
And it’s not because the implementations haven’t been good. There have been some magnificent systems put together (at incredible cost), with high quality video, multiple cameras, synchronized whiteboards, and all sorts of cool hardware and features.
We see solutions claiming to provide technology that substitutes for face-to-face communication come up over and over. However, no one seems to ever stop and look at the facts, the research already done, the long history of failure in past attempts, etc. It seems we are doomed to repeat this history forever. Its too compelling – intuitively we know it must work.
But it doesn’t. I mean the technology works wonderfully – but it doesn’t achieve the stated goals of increasing productivity or reducing travel expenses. I’ll make this part one and end here, continuing this theme tomorrow.
