Keeping it Real
A little perspective, please.
Virtual technologies – the software and gadgets that immerse you into a digital world – are still in their infancy. So, no, Captain Kirk/funbunny37 will not be beaming themselves into your living room for your entertainment anytime soon. Sorry about that.
In reality, most of what’s out there right now is limited to “Ain’t that neat?” products: under-commercialized virtual worlds such as Second Life, interactive gaming platforms such as the Nintendo Wii or wildly inefficient business solutions that only Donald Trump can afford. However, if a handful of local entrepreneurs and researchers can walk the walk over the next several months, Alberta may just have a shot at being recognized as a serious player on the world stage of – wait for it – useful virtual technologies.
Up in Edmonton, a new company called VR Tech is planning its go-to-market strategy for a revolutionary business conferencing and collaboration tool it’s calling Tele-Immersion. Led by Alberta Council of Technologies founder Perry Kinkaide and local tech diva Kim Kerr, VR Tech has partnered with research network TR Labs to build a new-aged VR business solution with eye-popping value propositions.
In a nutshell, Tele-Immersion is a high-quality web conferencing system with the ability to cut a user’s image out of their real environment and place it in a virtual one, along with an unlimited number of other users. Picture the Mona Lisa. Now, carefully and quickly, erase all that pointless background so Mona is the only thing left in the picture. Now digitize the lady and beam her up on the Internet for a sales meeting with Whistler’s Mother over cosmopolitans in Bora Bora. Cool technology, sure, but it’s the business proposition that’s really sexy.
First, by eliminating that useless background, Tele-Immersion reduces the bandwidth required to transmit the user’s image, cutting transmission expense by perhaps 50%. The next best solution on the market today is insanely difficult to use and goes for about $500,000. The near idiot-proof Tele-Immersion solution – not much more difficult to operate than Skype – will go for maybe 1% of that.
Not convinced? According to some Nortel calculations, a company spending $100,000 annually on business travel that switches to a virtual conferencing product such as Tele-Immersion can recover about 1,700 hours of lost productivity, reduce its carbon footprint by perhaps 18 tonnes and save as much as $30,000 per year. So, the benefit to you, Mr./Ms. Manager, is that you lose the hassle of flying place to place, keep the benefit of meeting face to face and help protect our atmosphere. Is that real enough for you?
Pages: 1 2 3
Follow Alberta Venture On: