Let’s step back and look at the core needs of good conversations. The building blocks, if you will, of hybrid meetings. Whether you are joining a virtual meeting space from the office or remotely, your most basic needs to effectively communicate are to: cinematic meetings
- See who you’re talking to
- See the reactions of everyone in the meeting
- Understand the situational context of participants (i.e. where in-room participants are situated in relationship to one another)
- Feel like part of the discussion.
Particularly in rooms with just one camera at the end of a conference table, that last core can be difficult to achieve. Without awkwardly asking everyone to turn and face the camera every time they speak, virtual participants see the sides and backs of talking heads. One solution for this is the use of multiple cameras.
The challenge with multiple cameras
It’s a great idea- and it opens more opportunities to break the experience. For instance, seeing duplicate views of a participant at various camera angles can be confusing, and requires more cognitive lift for the remote user. If in-room participants appear out of order in the virtual meeting space, the far-end loses necessary in-room context – you can’t tell who’s talking to whom.
Not to mention – all of this can be information overload. In any given moment, which is the most important interaction to see in the virtual meeting space? In an in-person interaction, you can dynamically choose what you see. You can choose to look at the active speaker, you can look around the room to see reactions, you can turn to see a side discussion…
In a virtual space, these decisions are out of your hands. But what if AI could intelligently make these decisions on the fly to give you the best view of any meeting, at any moment?
Introducing cinematic meetings powered by RoomOS
Directed by RoomOS, Cinematic meetings will give you the best view of any meeting at any moment. Just like a movie director transitions between shots and scenes- your view of the meeting will dynamically change to meet the right need at any moment. This is what RoomOS by Cisco can do. And, it’s an experience that will be available with Cisco and third-party cameras.
Unrivaled experiences in any workspace
We’ve also innovated for a complex room setup that’s really common. You might have it in your office space already – the open floor meeting space. Why is it complex, you ask? The answer is in defining the meeting space boundary. Picture this. You’re calling remotely into a virtual meeting space, and your colleagues join from a device in an open floor plan. Someone walks by in the background, and the camera picks them up as if they are a meeting participant. This same scenario can happen in meeting rooms with glass walls – people walking past are erroneously entered into the virtual meeting space. Suddenly an uninvited guest gets an on-screen frame. The technology is no longer seamless – it’s distracting.
Thoughtfully innovated for collaboration in open spaces and in rooms with glass walls, our devices intelligently exclude people standing outside a defined boundary. This “meeting zone” perimeter can be drawn manually, or AI-powered RoomOS will intelligently learn on the edge to determine the correct perimeter of the meeting space. And, when it’s time to change the room’s physical layout, no worries. At any time, the boundary can be reset and re-drawn.
At Cisco, we are committed to delivering the most natural, effective conversations in any location. Visit our webpage to learn more about our innovations in camera intelligence.
To learn more about video and camera intelligence for Cisco devices, contact your Cisco representative.
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