Many of our offices are now empty as we spend time in our offices
The new Zoom TV from DTEN It is, frankly, a bit silly.
It’s a 27 “standalone touch screen with three cameras, eight microphones, and built-in Zoom software. It combines with your laptop or phone via ultrasonic sound, connects to your calendar, and allows you to join meetings with one touch, and includes whiteboard capacity, for $ 599.
In other words, instead of reusing the technology you already own (like that laptop with a camera already embedded in it), you can add more technology to your home office at an additional cost and have a few straggler cables around your desk.
On the other hand, the device announces a new stage in remote environmental presence.
Where we are together, even apart.
We have some of that, of course, in Slack and email and old-fashioned Zoom on our computers, but it’s not the same as being in an office where you can stop by a colleague’s desk and ask a question. Environmental Remote Presence is a permanent full-time video link for your teammates across the country and the planet – best for being in the same office.
It’s a Vancouver-based startup Perch I tried doing it about seven years ago, but it lacked a global pandemic that forced large percentages of the world’s knowledge workers to work from their home offices.
But this is what they created: an app for their old phones or tablets to turn them into continuous remote presence machines:
Sure – you need to put some limits around it so it doesn’t get creepy, only during business hours, or more likely during established office hours, but this can be much more natural than Slack or Google Meet or … Zoom scheduled meetings
The Perch solution included some technology to know when the device was approached, so it knew when to activate it, in a sense, but it was an always-on portal for your coworkers. I currently work with colleagues in San Francisco, Berlin, Tel Aviv and other places. I would give them access to my home office during established hours to make our collaboration more social and effortless.
However, the only thing is that I would rather not buy a hardware solution (in this case, DTEN) that links me to a single provider (in this case, Zoom).
The new DTEN ME, made for Zoom for the home
Zoom and DTEN are launching the device in concert with “Zoom for Home”. Zoom’s new home office solution enables subscribers to use video conferencing, calls, whiteboards, and much more “personal collaboration devices.”
“After experiencing remote work ourselves for the past few months, it was clear that we needed to innovate a new category dedicated to remote workers,” said Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, in a statement.
The device is available for pre-order now.
The concept – remote environmental presence – is one that we have just begun to explore.
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