We've been researching solutions in this space for quite a while.
We have 6x 80" smartboards and have tried everything from Lync to Realtimeboard.
While some solutions work better than others, no one has solved a fundamental problem... When you try to collaborate in real time with a remote person - all the human communication cues are lost.
Collaboration is a dynamic and fluid process. We subconsciously read each other to gauge the reaction to a proposal, we interject and riff off of others. We try to pull introverts into the conversation and tame the extroverts.
All of this is practically impossible when a colleague is elsewhere on the network.
Two anecdotes; not sure if they help at all, but they're related and I like sharing :)
1. I work in a loud, open plan office where I wind up taking many phone discussions with 5+ participants. Since our teleconferencing software doesn't have a global push to talk, we all have to manually toggle our mic mutes, which has become an ad-hoc indicator of a desire to speak (along with the background noise that is a cue that 'someone' is thinking).
2. There's this let's play series (whose name eludes me at the moment) that doesn't have a face cam. The actors, then, are forced to constantly narrate their actions: they hmm and haw more often than normal, fill empty airspace with idle, easily uninterruptible chatter, etc. In other words, it seems like their discourse adjusts to the limitations of the medium.
Anyhow, I hope you can solve that problem before AR/VR takes over the entire space! :D
Currently the only nonverbal cues I can really get across are hand/head movements(with cube avatars) but as far as achieving presence goes I find that to go a long way. Even without facial expressions or complicated hand gestures having that "physical" presence seems to make each session feel really concrete, and less like you're talking to someone through the ether. To make up for the loss of facial expressions I've found myself and others becoming more gestural when using the app, which may not be ideal, but the fact that you can adapt at all(and that it feels natural) sets it apart from 2D interfaces.
That's really neat! The facial cues can be done today in real-time to a surprisingly high-quality degree (I do virtual filmmaking as a hobby), and with cheap mocap hardware, you could get the full upper body and what not. I'd expect when combined with the HTC Vive that you'd get a pretty decent VR experience.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic. This is definitely a problem faced by any company with remote teams, including mine. I'm not saying any of the solutions I posited are feasible, but one day, far in the future, I'm hopeful that some kind of solution will be developed. If anything, because there is a huge market in facilitating communication between remote teams.
All of these centre around the concept of a large display surface, some digital whiteboarding, flexible content layout then some VC 'tacked on' so that remote paricipants can join in.
What I find waaaay more interesting is some more of the combination acoustic + CV based camera tracking that's starting to make it's way to market. In addition to tracking people, it can also track objects of interest — things like auto-framing a whiteboard when someone approaches it. Cisco is currently doing this on their collaboration endpoints with SpeakerTrack and PresterTrack and other vendors have similar tech too. There's also a solutions that are starting to use camera arrays or super wide angle sensors to capture a larger scene and extract areas of interest (https://www.huddly.com/, http://www.owllabs.com/).
Other than tighter integration with skype for business, how does it solve some of the issues I laid out above?
I don't think our IT team got these specific devices in to test. The 20K for the 80" is a dealbreaker compared to the smartboards. Curious if there's something special about them compared to a smartboard on a win10 box?
The Surface Hub is the successor to Perceptive Pixel [0] which has some very smart people working on what makes multitouch work. Hardware-wise it's a capacitive screen vs. almost all other big touchable screens that use other technologies that are inferior.
It will do nothing to address your concerns about the absence of body language, gaze direction, facial expressions, etc. It's a trade-off, you give up some of the bandwidth of meeting face-to-face for the benefit of including people not physically present (or expense of bringing remote people local). The technology used to bring in remote people can also add value by capturing/saving work more automatically and seamlessly than, say, someone stepping back and snapping a photo of a whiteboard.
Some of the bandwidth loss can be compensated for by examining your processes, identifying what you value, and formalizing the valued communication in another form. Often the other form is saying things out loud; instead of looking for head nods, you ask people to say "yes" or "no." The technology can aid in this by providing other channels like up and down votes or "question" votes in place of confused looks (that are all to easy to overlook when you're in person anyway).
This is one of the things where I think remote work can fall down: standing around a shared space to easily quickly scribble and share ideas. Video gets you close, and lots of tools have some kind of sharable space you can write on or draw on with a mouse, but none of them have ever been as effective as a whiteboard for me when you're trying to quickly explain a concept or structure.
Actual product looks annoying though. It's a quite specific kind of team that wants to drop $5000+ per screen, and it's definitely not small fully remote startups (where doing that for everybody is both very expensive and super inconvenient), even though that's where this would be most awesome.
Might try and have a go soon with just cheap graphics tablets and existing web tools though, or just normal android tablets. Almost the same experience, at a tiny fraction of the price.
A 40-50" (diagonal) "whiteboard" is still very small. I have a 4'x10' whiteboard right behind me, and a 6'x4' to my immediate right, and I'm always running out of room.
I picked up a wacom tablet + mischief[1] a couple years ago as a digital whiteboarding solution for classroom teaching. It supports arbitrary zooming and infinite panning - so you never have to delete anything, but can just keep moving around and 'finding' more fresh space to write in. I have a really hard time going back to normal whiteboards now given how limited they are. (And photos of the whiteboard after a meeting are really nowhere near as good as an editable source file you can pass around).
Since moving back to engineering work I've started using it for talks, brainstorming and architecture reviews. Eg, this is what a solo few days of project planning & brainstorming looked like recently - https://josephg.com/mischief.png . But in meetings it lacks multiplayer - only one person can hold the tablet at a time, and the interface is nowhere near as intuitive as a real whiteboard. The software is also kind of awful - it idles on 5% CPU usage for no apparent reason, and I've lost work on numerous occasions from it crashing without autosaving (!!). The mac version feels like a bad port of a windows program.
The tool itself frustrates me enough that I'll probably end up writing a collaborative online version on top of sharejs, even if I'm the only person who uses it. (It'd be much easier to do now that pointer events[2] are being supported in more browsers. Safari developers - hate the API all you like, but we really need an interface for tablets somehow!)
I can't be sure, but it seems like they are just going to release a big Wacom tablet and add real-time collaboration for the price of a 2013 SMART car. That isn't a fair comparison, as it is unlikely corporations will be comparing a fleet of used smart cars to collaboration workstations in their budget. WTF is the usecase for this? 10-11k for people to draw on the same canvas in different locations? I think it is actually quite cool, but the pricepoint is absurd and it is an open question how the real-time sync will work between >1 device.
I am half serious when I say that this product seems to be exclusively marketed at apple engineers & designers to lazy to walk up the stairs to collaborate with each other.
so you are saying there's a market for a 4k 55" collaborative device that recognizes pen, multi-touch, has a camera and hopefully software that does not suck and integrates with Hangouts / Skype for Business at a lower pricepoint?
Seriously though...I have yet to see the Surface Hub used anywhere apart from MS offices.
I've seen the Surface Hub's predecessor, Perceptive Pixel, at Harvard once. I think that one was purchased. CS50 also has the 80" model that was "loaned" by Microsoft.
I wonder if the "under $6,000" price for the Jamboard includes the wheeled stand. The 55" Hub's rolling stand alone is ~$2,350.
I think his point is that there is a market for business collaboration tools since remote teams are becoming more common, but for all its technical merit, a large featureful interactive whiteboard doesn't really solve the problem -- and it's a very expensive way to not solve a problem.
Every "interactive whiteboard" (brand and design) I've ever used sucks.
The best setup I've used so far is a standard whiteboard coupled with a projector (ideally with a second board to the side). It needs very regular cleaning to prevent a blurry display, but being able to write normally (being able to see what you're writing with zero lag) is a huge benefit.
If you really need at-board interactivity (as opposed to keyboard+mouse at the PC, or wirelessly, or casting from a tablet, or...) then Epson do a projector with an IR "pen" that works with any old whiteboard.
As someone who worked at SMART, I totally agree. I am pretty sure some of it was written in the mid 2000s and never updated.
The company never cared about end-user experience until it was too late. They raked in the money when education budgets were high and every classroom could afford a SMART board and sat on their hands after they IPO'd.
The people there are fantastic, but it just wasn't possible to steer the ship fast enough to kill the old culture.
We run a startup and have been working on the remote-teamwork problem for a while now.
Having dabbled with hardware and partnering with hardware vendors, mainly because we believe hardware is definitely a piece of the puzzle but, to frame the problem around the device first, is the pitfall that SMART/MS SurfaceHub have all fallen into.
As others have pointed out, sinking thousands of dollars into a solution that will soon be replaced due to advancements in display technology, hardly seems worth it, especially for small to medium businesses. We designed our software so that anyone can pick it up and try it for free with their team, without worrying about needing new or fancy hardware.
Ultimately Collaboration includes all of your devices, including your big touch screens, pc's, smaller devices and whatever else that may turn up in the future (VR?). Google's offering for drawing has always been lacklustre and its a shame there is nothing we can try and use from this announcement today.
For those wondering, my startup is called Collusion (collusionapp.com).
We built collaborative whiteboards into our distance learning classrooms in 1997 or 1998. Smartboards were around for several years before we started and we wrote custom drivers to capture the cursor position and send the pointer information to the remote sites.
I have been very interested in this seemingly similar software, and the projection hardware is much more conducive to this scenario.
http://www.nureva.com/span-system
This is so much better. I don't understand why they have to sell the hw whiteboard when everybody could see everything on their tablets and laptops, plus the screen every meeting room already has. Especially since they target remote collaboration.
Is there any app like limnu but without the paid service behind and save to any cloud or local storage?
Okay, so they're selling hardware here. It was hard to tell! I thought it might just be the overglorified collaborative whiteboard software, of which there is already much out there.
We have 6x 80" smartboards and have tried everything from Lync to Realtimeboard.
While some solutions work better than others, no one has solved a fundamental problem... When you try to collaborate in real time with a remote person - all the human communication cues are lost.
Collaboration is a dynamic and fluid process. We subconsciously read each other to gauge the reaction to a proposal, we interject and riff off of others. We try to pull introverts into the conversation and tame the extroverts.
All of this is practically impossible when a colleague is elsewhere on the network.