Beam me in Scotty

Katzenberg subsequently called on the technical wizardry of the animation team to invent a way for employees to collaborate without physically leaving their offices. The result was a high-tech videoconferencing system, aptly dubbed Halo.

For those who yawn at the very mention of the word “videoconferencing”, hold your breath. Halo is the real deal. There’s no time delay, no static and no annoying digital dribble that makes the person on the other end look and sound like Max Headroom.

The Halo “rooms” are designed so that the features—from the colour of the walls to the sheen on the conference table—are identical, creating the illusion that you are in the same location. The sound and visuals are also nothing short of cinema quality.

It generally takes about 10 minutes to acclimate to the environment, but after that it is easy to forget that the people sat across from you are in a different room. Case in point: during a demo at the DreamWorks studio a few years ago, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stood up to shake the hand of the person who was sat “across” the table, having forgotten that that person wasn’t actually there.

For companies that can afford the £300,000 price tag for the two-room starter kit (plus £10,000 monthly service charges), Halo offers a practical alternative to travel and a return on investment, based on a sizeable reduction in direct (e.g. airline tickets, etc.) and indirect (e.g. time spent travelling) travel-related costs.

It is something business travel agencies, airlines and hotels may not be too happy about, but the companies using Halo say they are reaping the financial returns and seeing improved productivity. “Halo is being used to do exactly what it was designed to do: enable companies to conduct business without travelling,” says Katzenberg. “Halo doesn’t mean people will stop travelling—it means face-to-face visits will be more focused.”

Whereas Katzenberg used to travel between DreamWorks’ California and Bristol, England offices every three weeks he now commutes every three months. Likewise, Halo has enabled the animation team to reduce their travel by about one-third.

“We used to take 75 to 100 flights per month between our Southern and Northern California offices alone so we’ve made our investment in Halo back in just a few months,” says Katzenberg.

Hewlett Packard, which helped develop Halo and has a revenue share agreement with DreamWorks Animation, has also seen a substantial reduction in its travel budget, as have fellow Halo customers, PepsiCo and Advanced Micro Devices.

HP, which counts 12 rooms in six cities around the globe, and is brining another room online in Germany in March, has halved international travel from its West Coast offices and seen similar travel reductions in other regions.

“We tell customers it takes about six months to recoup the investment in Halo based on a reduction in travel costs and increased productivity” says Ken Crangle, HP’s general manager for Halo. “Most of our one to two days trips are no longer happening because it’s simply not as productive to travel,” says Mark Dollins, a member of the Halo project team for PepsiCo.

Linda Star, vice president, worldwide sales and marketing, Advanced Micro Devices, says the company expects to recoup the price of Halo in a few months. “This was not a budgeted item but once we saw it we knew we had to have it,” says Star. “We’re not only saving on the physical aspect of travel. We are saving on productivity and increasing our work-life balance because we don’t have to travel as much.”

But just as Halo is allowing companies to avoid travel, the location of the Halo room itself is becoming the new destination. “We’re seeing this more often, where employees will take a short-haul flight to a location where there is a Halo room, have their meeting, and then hop a flight back home that same day,” says Paul Bradley, head of Halo’s business in Europe.

Officially launched in Europe last month, Halo has attracted such companies as Swiss-based Novartis, which has signed up for two rooms to link its Basel, Switzerland and Cambridge, Mass. offices. Crangle says HP will roll out a broader international campaign this summer and expects to close the year with triple-digit room numbers.

For now, Halo’s target audience is HP’s existing Fortune 500 clients, which can afford the hefty investment. “Our biggest challenge with Halo is getting the price down and making it more mainstream without compromising the technology,” says DreamWorks’ chief technology officer Ed Leonard.

Ironically, Halo’s most likely path to the mainstream market will be through airport lounges and hotel business centres, where business travellers will be able to hire a room for a meeting, thereby maximising their time on the road. Crangle says HP is in discussions with airlines and hotels to install Halo rooms, and plans to announce a partnership later this year.

Mark Gorzynski, HP’s chief scientist for Halo, says the next phase of Halo will connect multiple rooms at different locations, making it possible to hold a meeting between offices in London, New York and Singapore, for example.

“When we set out to build Halo it was speculative that it would even work but it has far exceeded our expectations and now the potential uses are unlimited,” says Katzenberg.

For DreamWorks, Katzenberg says, “Halo means we can have the right creative person—wherever they are—where we need them to be.” For prospective customers, Halo holds the promise of reduced travel costs, increased productivity and, perhaps more importantly, a farewell to jetlag.

However, like with any technology, there are occasional glitches. During our demo of Halo at HP’s offices in London there was a technical snafu which prevented the DreamWorks’ team in California from hearing us. HP said it had never happened before—and maybe it hadn’t—but the experience did highlight the fact that technology, regardless of how innovative it is, can’t replace face-to-face communication. That said, Halo is still a cool, revolutionary product that makes you wonder just how long it will be before we can actually “beam” ourselves into our next meeting.

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