Spatial Meetings Go Beyond Remote Learning With 'Distance Zero'

Forbes

2 days ago

Inside the Spatial Meeting environment, students have an immersive experience of being in the ... More classroom while also being able to engage with renderings of objects, achieving an experience Cisco calls "Distance Zero."
Cisco Systems has partnered with Apple and H-Farm, an Italian educational institution and technology incubator, to launch an innovative educational initiative called 'Spatial Meetings.' This collaboration leverages Apple's Vision Pro headset and Cisco's immersive meeting infrastructure to achieve 'Distance Zero,' a term coined by Cisco to refer to the ability of technology to replicate the immediacy and interpersonal dynamics of face-to-face meetings, even when participants are geographically distant.
Cisco's Spatial Meetings utilize high-resolution, stereoscopic 3D video combined with true-to-color rendering, delivered through Apple's Vision Pro headset. This combination allows participants to see detailed facial expressions and body language and even interact with objects in a virtual yet realistic environment. As Snorre Kjesbu, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Collaboration Devices at Cisco explains, 'Good technology should always be the supporting actor. It should never get in the way—it should support what you're doing.' The goal, after all, is not to have the most realistic virtual environment possible; the goal is to have highly effective meetings in which the focus is on the content of the meeting and not the experience of the conference room.
The site for this experiment has been the campus of H-Farm. Located near Venice, Italy, H-Farm began as a startup incubator and has evolved into an educational hub, serving over 3,000 students across high school and university levels. The institution prioritizes digital innovation and, as such, was a natural early adopter of Cisco's Spatial Meetings. Diego Pizzocaro, Director at H-Farm College, recalled their initial experience of seeing the Spatial Meetings technology: 'When we tried it, it was basically a lightbulb moment.'
Describing the Spatial Meetings is challenging, as it is very much the type of thing one needs to experience for oneself. What is remarkable about the environment is the fact that it easily achieves many of the benchmarks essential for an immersive conference experience. To begin with, the head sizes and positions of the other participants are effectively the same as your own. This gives the sense of people actually being in a common space rather than being technologically mediated. The other key element is the ability to readily convey non-verbal information. Depending on the context, non-verbal communication can account for anywhere from 60% to 90% of what is communicated. Anyone who has been in a seminar where two people arguing have gone off the rails has had the experience of turning to a classmate and both rolling your eyes. This is an essential experience of a rich environment and one that is typically lacking in standard video conferencing. In Spatial Meetings these types of interactions occur naturally.
Educational applications at H-Farm using Spatial Meetings focus heavily on hybrid learning environments, significantly enhancing student engagement and concentration. 'Our students reported increased immersion and focus,' Pizzocaro noted. 'They can attend a math lecture from literally anywhere and feel like they're in the front row.' Another significant advantage is that, unlike in typical video conferencing environments, they are fully immersed in the experience, free from the distraction of competing apps or objects in their surroundings.
Cisco's Spatial Meetings allow educators and students to interact with physical objects alongside virtual renderings, facilitating interactive and comparative analysis in fields such as design, architecture, and engineering. Cisco's technology includes specialized hardware already installed in thousands of locations globally, facilitating seamless integration of this immersive meeting experience. Standing in front of a properly equipped conference room, a professor can demonstrate the properties of a physical object and then send a digital copy to a remote participant who can explore just as if she were in the classroom.
In addition to bringing remote participants into the classroom and classroom objects to remote participants, the space created by the Spatial Meetings can also facilitate interaction between students and AI. Since the meeting space is virtual, remote students and generated participants are joining the same virtual space in the same way, providing a type of ontological parity between the attendees. The fact that only one exists elsewhere in physical space ceases to be a point of significance.
Moving forward, Cisco and Apple plan to deepen their collaboration, enhancing the capabilities of the Spatial Meetings platform. H-Farm continues to develop educational content and tools to take advantage of the environment, enabling educators to integrate immersive experiences into their teaching more easily. Demonstrations and further integrations of this technology are planned to showcase its broader applicability and effectiveness. For now, the biggest challenge is the limited availability of the headsets, but this should change as newer models are released and prices come down. At the end of the day, the collaboration among Cisco, Apple, and H-Farm provides a striking illustration of how technology can not only bridge physical distances but also fundamentally enhance the educational experience.