HP launches 'virtual meeting room'

Halo Collaboration Studio Hewlett-Packard's Studio creates an enabling environment that allows people to see each other, talk and operate remotely as if they were still in the same room.

Halo rooms can accommodate up to 6 people sitting around the table, facing colleagues via 4 50-inch (127 cm) plasma screens. The camera is placed close to the screen to create a feeling that the speaker is looking directly at the person on the other side. HP has limited communication interruptions and avoided public Internet.

This partnership with DreamWorks primarily serves large corporations. It helps companies save time and flight costs from one location to another. Each virtual room costs about 550,000 USD and the fee is 18,000 USD / month.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks CEO, said the idea of ​​building the system began to take shape after 9/11 in the United States. That event caused the airline industry to cut down on flights, messy security and travel to become a problem. Two major customers approved of HP technology are PepsiCo and AMD.

However, video conference rooms are not new products. Teliris, founded in 2002 in the UK, has developed a similar model. " What Hewlett-Packard has introduced is more backward than our new product for two generations, " commented Marc Trachtenberg, Teliris CEO. " Teliris' virtual room is technically more sophisticated, features and costs are half as low ."