Virtual reality

Howard Lichtman tells EHM about the revolutionary new technology that is changing the way pharma companies do business.

“As the value goes up, more people will join; as more people join, the value goes up more - it's a very positive cycle”

Since technology became centrally important to business operations, researchers around the world have been working to streamline communications across long distances. Communication via digital channels began in the 1980s, and spread to the masses though software such as MSN Messenger and Skype. Now the next level has arrived, in the form of telepresence.

Howard Lichtman, President of Human Productivity Lab, defines telepresence as: “Visual collaboration solutions that address the human factors of participants and as closely as possible attempt to replicate an in-person experience.”

According to Lichtman, the technology of telepresence is so advanced it is capable of convincing users they are in the same physical space with someone who is on the other side of the world. He describes the intelligence behind the technology: “The creation of an in-person experience is accomplished by a combination of factors: Mirroring the environment, so it seems like all the architectural elements on both sides of the world are the same, creating a feeling of being in the same physical space.” Low-latency video and audio codecs, high-quality private IP networks, life-size images, fluid video,  accurate flesh tones and spatial acoustics are also used to maintain the illusion. It’s important to ensure the camera is out of sight, because people behave differently when they’re aware they are being filmed.

“Telepresence firms minimize the bezels, use large rear projection video walls, or large beam-splitters to create a more immersive experience, so that it’s much different from the observant experience of watching a TV set,” Lichtman says. “When you get the human factors of the experience right, people will actually use it, and they’ll use it much more than they would have used traditional videoconferencing. Statistics collected from five pharma companies show that they used traditional videoconferencing for no more than 11 hours per month. But when you make an investment in these environments, people will use them 50, 60, 70, 100-plus hours per month.

“You don’t need draconian travel restrictions, because you still want people to travel and move the ball when that is the most appropriate form of communication. However, there are many times when, if you could have the same dynamics as a personal meeting but save the cost, you would accelerate your time-to-market advantage, the development cycle of a drug and the approval and testing process.

“Being able to give your employees that tool is very, very important, and that’s why companies have been investing in this technology. They have seen usage go up, they have seen their travel go down, they have seen time-to-market advantage, they have seen improved productivity; all of the things that videoconferencing promised but never delivered because people didn’t like it. It was unnatural, it was painful, there was delay, there was lag,” explains Lichtman.

More reliable
Not only is the technology beneficial for creating a personal experience and avoiding the ‘pain’ of the old system, it is also creates a much more reliable network with the right kind of bandwidth, ensuring there are no screen remnants or fragments. Lichtman explains that it maintains a very low latency to ensure there is no delay between sites.

“in the old days,” Lichtman explains, “videoconferencing was delivered over a lot of point-to-point circuits. So firms might have had a T-1 data line between a main videoconferencing room in London and an office in New York, that’s all it’s dedicated to. You couldn’t have other IP applications competing for the videoconferencing bandwidth because video traffic is delay intolerant, and if it suffers packet loss, then you lose the experience and then the technology becomes a distraction instead of a benefit,” he says.

Instead of point-to-point circuits, companies are now changing the way in which they communicate, using IP videoconferencing both internally and externally. Previously, the technology was generally used for headquarters to talk to remote offices. Now companies are investing in what Lichtman describes as ‘telepresence community of interest networks’ (CoINs).

“You can invest in telepresence  CoINs that will not only connect you to your other locations but will connect you to the other members of the community of interest network. You’re buying connectivity into a cloud that’s going to support your own locations, but now you can call people in other companies. You can call your vendors, suppliers, joint venture partners, your law firm, your service providers, etc. What you’re seeing is the value of joining this telepresence community, and the interest of watching the networks grow,” says Lichtman.

Lichtman says COINs are now beginning to take off in a big way, as the ROI becomes even greater with more companies joining the community. And the more partners a business is able to communicate, the better.

Industry specific
“As more and more people join COINs, the value of being connected goes up,” Lichtman says. “As the value goes up, more people will join; as more people join, the value goes up more – it’s a very positive cycle.”

“For the movie industry it means they’re building editing rooms, where you can work in the editing process in real-time between different locations. That’s what HP Halo started out as. They’re building pitch rooms where you can do storyboarding and development for the film industry.

“In the banking sector, they can take subject matter experts in one centralised location and transport them to any of their branch locations. For example, you might have a relationship with a big bank in Ohio and you need a foreign letter of credit, but the foreign letter of credit specialist is in New York; now you’re able to move this expertise around the world in this very compelling and natural way.”

According to Lichtman, many pharmaceutical companies are using telepresence systems in their research and development environments. “For example, Teliris has built one for GlaxoSmithKline. The big boys view this as a strategic, competitive advantage, and they’re not that willing to share some of the trade secrets of exactly what they’re doing, but suffice to say, it’s pretty clear which companies are beginning to build application-specific telepresence solutions. What this means for the pharmaceutical industry is that there can be shared research and development between labs in the US and Europe.”

Lichtman compares the development of telepresence to that of the telephone and fax machine. As more people began to use them, they became normalised into business operations, and thetechnology continued to improve. Telepresence communications currently exist mainly on the executive floors of Fortune 500 companies, with only executives seeing, using and understanding this new process of communication. Lichtman advises that the experience of telepresence cannot be understood without being experienced.

“To understand the power of it, you have to go and sit in one of these environments, and say, ‘This feels like I’m sitting in the same room with a guy who is half way around the world. We’re having a normal conversation, it’s not painful, we can be very effective in it, we can share data. I can show him my PowerPoint slides. I can show him this Excel spreadsheet and we can work in it simultaneously.’”

One of the main advantages of telepresence is the ability it provides to avoid the need for travel when holding meetings. Lichtman gives the following example: “When I was Vice President of Business Development at TeleSuite, which was one of the  pioneers in the industry, GSK was one of our customers. At the time they were making around 700 flights a month between between London and Philadelphia. They had a corporate policy where business class travel was available for flights over five hours in length so it was very expensive proposition. They were able to put in  telepresence solutions and cut that travel in half.

“The other advantage is that if you have a problem you can immediately huddle the team.  You can immediately get people around the world together in a natural format where you can be productive, where that might not have even been possible with travel. You can also hook up testing informatics and other R&D tools, for example, to look at a microscope slide remotely.

High adoption
The US currently boasts the highest rate of telepresence adoption, but Lichtman says the rest of the world is not far behind. “Europe is number two by far, and it’s spreading rapidly to Asia; the Pacific Rim is now starting to get more popular. Telepresence was essentially a homegrown technology in the US, and the major companies in the space are American companies –  Cisco, HP, Polycom, Teliris – and so the sales forces and corporate marketing groups are there, but it’s definitely a global phenomenon. I’ve seen stories recently about firms in South Africa, Dubai, Israel and Russia that have deployed it.”

Although telepresence offers many advantages over traditional teleconferencing, there are still a few familiar downsides. You can’t shake hands with the person you are meeting, for example. You can’t go out and have a drink at the pub, or even hand them your business card. “And because it is an environment where the camera is on you, that can be good and bad,” Lichtman says. “It’s good in the sense that people pay more attention.  People will actively listen and participate more versus checking their Blackberries. The flipside is that they may be less candid because of the potential for the meeting to be recorded.”

Lichtman says the technology will only get more realistic as the technology develops. “There’s an amazing jump in realism between the average telepresence setup and traditional videoconferencing, which I call the ‘plastic camera on the TV set on the dessert cart’. The experience is only going to get more real. It will also get cheaper; as IP networks develop around the world and there are submarine cables and fibre optics going to more countries. The cost of delivery and the cost of the network and the managed services that support it are more expensive than the endpoints. It’s those costs that will go down.”

Lichtman also predicts that utility will go up as more telepresence CoINs join together and have network-to-network interconnects between them, and as more companies that have proprietary codecs and calling plans make their systems more interoperable. “We will get to the point where virtually every major company in the world will have a room, and you will be able to walk into the room and call any other company in the world, and sit down and have a real meeting, and it will be like you’re in the same physical space. You’ll be able to share information much more easily, and that is going to supercharge the flow of knowledge and the speed of innovation.

“Good things will come of this, in the same way that good things came out of the internet. Good drugs will be developed faster and bad drugs will be discovered sooner. The quality and the amount of information that is being exchanged will go up dramatically, and that will be overwhelmingly positive.”

Howard S. Lichtman is President of the Ashburn, VA-based Human Productivity Lab, the world's leading consultancy on telepresence, telepresence managed services, and telepresence inter-networking.