Latest headlines: Christopher Gillespie on how videoconferencing could be better, Bob Snyder on Google’s latest offering and more
April 20, 2022 | Volume: 20 | Issue: 15
Today on rAVe [TV], Gary and I talked about this article featured by Chris Gillespie about whether videoconferencing is terrible. Chris makes good points! Is your client’s conference room everything it could be for participants near and far? Probably not. Is that your fault? Not necessarily. I stick by my forever golden rule: The client/customer should bring in the AV team earlier, then they can have the conference room optimized for the video call of their dreams. And it won’t necessarily take two monitors and a camera that barely grazes the top of your head — not with (many of) you, trustworthy integrators!
Bob Snyder also writes about the latest offering from Google and how it might change our offices in the future. Imagine your tech using AI to recognize who you are and what you’re about to do when you walk into a conference room and turning on everything and optimizing the settings for you — what a dream. But could it be real?
I have had the unique experience of having a front-row seat regarding videoconferencing (VC) over the last 30 years. As I have watched it evolve, I have seen not just WHAT changed but, more importantly, WHY it changed. At the same time, I have also seen what HAS NOT changed. Unfortunately, from my vantage point, I see an issue in that we rarely challenge the status quo/sacred cows when it comes to VC. In most cases, we don’t even seem to know WHY the cows are sacred in the first place! So much of what we do today looks almost exactly the same as what we did 30 years ago. Sure, the quality has gotten exponentially better, the TVs are far larger … but the EXPERIENCE? I think it has (in many ways) gotten progressively worse.
The latest human-computer interface — an interface that could dramatically impact the AV business — comes from Google’s hardware invention studio, Advanced Technology & Projects (ATAP).
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