Connections

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — On Feb. 13, Cisco held its second annual Hollywood Showcase, a gathering of the company’s technology partners and the best and brightest within the company itself, with the event serving as both an industry-wide update on Cisco’s progress, and as an opportunity for company partners to share their ideas for the future.

And if the success of the first two annual events were any indication, you can bet there’ll be a third next year, according to John Dorval, area VP of Sales for Cisco.

“Watching the technology go from concept to reality, it’s validation,” he said, following the half-day event, which covered topics ranging from the state of technology in Hollywood, collaboration solutions for story development, post-production challenges, security and storage. “What we get out of it is seeing that we’re on the right track, that there are challenges we can come in and help solve.”

Taking a broad view of the topics discussed during the event, Jim Blakley, senior director of Intel Visual Cloud Innovation, said that one of the most difficult parts of advancing new technologies and new ways of collaboration is that change is difficult for companies, especially those on the tech side of Hollywood’s business.

“Any transformation takes a long time, and you have to take the long journey slant to adopting changes,” he said. “I like to say that in five years nothing changes, and in 10 years everything changes.”

And one of those areas where change is slowly happening is the realm of virtual reality and how Hollywood fits in. More than one studio has jumped in to VR, and in terms of using it in business, for things like in-company collaboration, Yannick Guillerm, director of technical marketing for storage firm Scality, it’s already showing legs.

“Sometimes you don’t even know if people are listening to you [during meetings],” he said. “With VR, I could see it being used every day.”

Blakley, however, cautioned that VR must get beyond the novelty stage, and that when it comes to Hollywood, storytelling is what drives experiences, not the medium it’s delivered in.

Meanwhile, members of Cisco’s Emerge team — which develops new technologies centered around the future of work and collaboration — shared the latest for its TeamTV and Spark VR initiatives.

TeamTV is an “always on” video channel that aims to bring remote workers into the Cisco office environment. Enhanced with a series of notifications and layered with machine learning, the TeamTV initiative allows remote workers to add information to the set-up to be shared with everyone, and allows for non-stop communication for everyone involved.

But beyond fun items like facial recognition and virtual assistant bots, TeamTV has a friendlier purpose, according to Matt Norris, technical leader of engineering at Cisco.

“When we started using this, we had a team member in D.C. who was a few hours ahead of us, and I just started a conversation with him, about things that we wouldn’t normally discuss,” he said. “This is our take on what happens between meetings, how to keep the conversation going.”

Additionally, David Reeckmann, engineering manager at Cisco, offered a look at how Spark VR is being used as a virtual meeting place for Cisco employees around the world, allowing for real-time interaction via avatars. The concept allows for a more fun — if imperfect — alternative to video conferencing, with the ability to share 3D specs, photos, files and other documents. Spark VR has an artificial intelligence component as well, one that can interject with images and statistics related to discussions, and even find someone in the company that can contribute to the discussion, and request their presence.

“It’s an experiment for us,” Reeckmann said. “What we’re trying to figure out is how people are going to use it, what applications would be involved. The benefits of getting in there have to outweigh the [hurdles] to getting in there.”

Currently, Spark VR is only enabled for the Oculus VR platform, with plans to expand it to other VR systems in the near future.