Tele-presence replace travel?

ikendu

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This is sort of a spin off of the "Future Transportation" thread in an area that never really got going in first place.

It really is about at least two aspects:

1. Tele-work...working remotely from the "workplace"

I did this for about 2 years in the early 90's. I worked for a large software company based on Long Island. I had a basement office in my home in Iowa and did almost all of my work from there except for some visits to customers and some trips to Long Island to meet with my manager. Over the two years, I probably was able to work about 75-85% from home. I did telephone support for a product and programming. I had 2 phone lines, one to talk and one for modem dial-in.

Since those days, many more such people work from home and we have broadband like cable modem and DSL plus practical video conferencing.

2. Video conferencing

There are now stds for internet based video conferencing (H.323) and the equipment and broadband access required are far more common. At one time Kinko's was putting in public, "for-charge" video conferencing in over a hundred of their locations. I work at a university now and have been using multi-point, internet conferencing to connect with peers at as many as 11 other universities at once to discuss topics of common interest. It requires a little attention to meeting control, and the connections sometimes halts and freezes momentarily, however, the experience is much like "being there". I much prefer this over travel to a conference! No airport, no plane, no taxis, no hotel, no sleeping out of your normal time zone. It is hugely cheaper in terms of time and money and way easier to digest one 2-hour topic of interest every few weeks instead of going to a 3 day conference and walking into an entirely new session and topic every 50 minutes or so!

Anyone got experience in either of these areas to comment? In this case, the "mileage" has to be hugely better to stay home and spin a few electrons around the internet instead of moving my body hundreds or even thousands of miles! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 

binky

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Dec 1, 2002
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I tried tried the virtual commute for a while. For a couple companies. Both times I found that unless the programming task was well-defined (never was) or I could be completely in charge (a manager would always come up with "but how will I measure your performance?" /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif) then it didn't work. On top of that, there were many things I'd gather sort of just by being in the office.

If it's just for meetings, then I agree the video conference works great. It just wouldn't have worked for my ecommerce development stuff for day-to-day stuff where collaboration was required.

I found that yes Kinko's had a rental program along with other "office supply" outfits and of course all the bandwidth providers did too. I think that the latest (c. 2001) that I saw, the Staples corp had the best service offer and the Sony lineup was the best hardware that we found during a fairly exhaustive overview.

Luckily, if you work for a university maybe bandwidth isn't even a consideration?
 

Albany Tom

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Aug 18, 2002
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Albany, NY
Our agency is looking into a telecommute pilot program.

Part of what I'm working on right now is a project to give employees access to their normal desktop applications through a browser from home, or other places. The benefit isn't just economy, it will improve out ability to survive a disaster, by relocating people electronically rather than physically, and dealing with command centers and other things we have to setup in a much more flexible way.

Work at home usually doesn't work all the time, though. The people we've had testing it typically work a couple of days a week at home, and a couple in the office. Otherwise you miss the interactions of people throughout the day, meetings are cumbersome, no one to bounce ideas off of, etc.

Personally, I can do quite a bit from home now. We have our portal, plus VPN, and our new servers let me do everything up to and including press the power button and install the OS remotely. Pretty cool.

Now - Is telepresence going to replace my hopeful trip to Florida this spring/summer? I hope not!!!!!
 

ikendu

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Iowa
Albany Tom said: ...give employees access to their normal desktop applications through a browser from home

I've started to do this at the university using WinXP on my desktop at work, joining our "Active Directory" (for naming of my machine) and controlling the desktop from home.

It is great! I have complete access to all of my files and features that I use at work...from home.

Albany Tom said: ...miss the interactions of people throughout the day

So...will desktop, personal video conferencing ever get so easy to use (like a phone is now) that people will be able to have that smooth and easy experience of other people...but from home?
 

PhotonBoy

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Mar 11, 2003
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Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, Canada http://tinyu
I think that plain old ubiquitous internet e-mail is killing fax machines, snail mail and now a bunch of airline companies.

The situation with the airlines is being accelerated by 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

I remember in the 60's when it took two weeks to send a thin blue paper air mail letter to Australia. Now you can send email anywhere in the blink of an eye.
 
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