Across the table, virtually

Now you can have real-time conferences across the globe "" for a price, of course.

Technology has long been shrinking physical distances, but now comes one that can virtually wipe them out.

With Cisco's new TelePresence solutions, you can sit in the company boardroom and interact with business partners or company executives who may be hundreds or thousands of miles away, literally across the table.

You can see the facial expressions of the virtual image down to the minutest detail, and even make eye contact and hear the image speak in real-time. This might well be the end of video-conferencing as we now know it, with its hazy expressions and the time lag between the audio imprints and the facial expressions or body language.

TelePresence uses an eight mega-bytes per second Internet connection, plasma screens that can accommodate up to two persons on a screen, an Internet Protocol (IP) phone connected with sensitive hi-fidelity microphones and speaker systems, and a triple-eye camera. To set up a call is simple since a user only needs to set the call in advance at a time of his choice.

The information and details of the call and location will be displayed on the display board on the IP phone. To participate in TelePresence, the person who is sitting in a room in some other part of the globe, should also have identical installations.

"Launched globally in December last year, Tele-Presence has just made business meetings that much easier and our own experience finds that businesses can cut travel costs at least 20 per cent once they start using the solutions for corporate meetings," says Ranajoy Punja, vice-president for advanced technologies, Cisco India and SAARC.

Cisco has installed the products at its offices in 70 locations, including one at its Bangalore headquarters. Regus Group recently bought about 50 TelePresence units.

"We are getting overwhelming responses globally. Although in India we have received some orders, no installations have happened so far," explains Punja.

The costs associated with the device are currently quite high, a factor of the high cost of the high-definition plasma screen and cameras. Priced at $90,000 for a single screen unit (which accommodates two persons) and $300,000 for three screen set-up (accommodates six people located in three different locations), it may seem to be costly for small- and medium-businesses. But consider the returns and business value for companies with a global footprint, say Cisco sources.

Cisco TelePresence meeting solutions also comes bundled with furniture for the boardroom. Apart from the one-time installation charges, users need need to also pay for bandwidth use.

TelePresence also uses an "auto collaborate" feature which allows participants to share information, presentations or documents on their laptops at the press of a button.

TelePresence is built on Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) which ensures that the system can be seamlessly integrated with pre-existing enterprise groupware and unified communications systems. Time for that virtual meeting.