Latest news with #SnorreKjesbu
Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Spatial Meetings Go Beyond Remote Learning With 'Distance Zero'
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.
Associated Press
03-03-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Cisco: Setting a Course for More Sustainable Office Spaces
The need for sustainability is everywhere, including where we work. Sustainability is an important consideration for businesses—and with good reason. From rising global temperatures to unprecedented levels of plastic pollution, we are constantly reminded of the importance of this topic 'I'm fortunate to meet with a lot of big companies every week—and this topic comes up in all my interactions,' says Snorre Kjesbu, SVP and GM of employee experiences at Cisco. He is also fortunate in being able to help these companies out. As the person in charge of a portfolio of collaboration technologies enabling remote working and virtual meetings, he is already instrumental in helping to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions linked to business travel. As of 2023, 12 percent of travel volume worldwide was for business, but the level is falling thanks to videoconferencing. The technology is also helping cut emissions linked to commuting, by allowing more people to work from home. Cutting corporate carbon footprints is 'the right thing to do,' says Kjesbu. 'It's right that we use the scarce resources of the planet correctly.' But sustainability is also often good for the bottom line. Research from an industry body called the Energy Efficiency Movement shows the industrial sector could save $437 billion by 2030 by applying efficiency measures such as digitizing machinery and processing data in the cloud. 'There is often a view that being sustainable costs more money, but that's not the case when it comes to efficiency,' says Energy Efficiency Movement communication and marketing lead Lisa Bounoure. 'Efficiency offers clear return on investment.' For Kjesbu, this quest for efficiency does not stop at helping cut the GHG emissions involved in corporate meetings. Cisco, which has a goal to reach net zero GHG emissions across its value chain by 2040, is also striving to improve the lifecycle efficiency of its products. As an example, 52% of the plastic in the Cisco Collaboration devices product line is post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic. Kjesbu says that replaces the use of 154 tonnes of virgin plastic with plastic removed from the waste stream, an amount of plastic equal to 7 million rubber ducks per year. The ENERGY STAR®-certified phones are also designed to require minimal amounts of metals, so even the top-end models in the series only weigh around a kilogram. Less weight means less energy is required to ship the phones in bulk, reducing supply chain costs and emissions. In addition to using fewer materials in manufacturing, office devices are being designed to consume less energy throughout their lifecycle.. The new Cisco Board Pro, for instance, has been engineered to consume85-89 percent less power in standby mode versus Display Off. Cutting standby power might not seem like a big deal, but all the devices currently in sleep mode around the world account for 1 percent of global carbon emissions, or about a third of the amount caused by aviation in 2023. And cutting these emissions can have a multiplier effect, says Kjesbu. 'If you use less power in sleep mode, it also means you generate less heat and so you don't need to cool buildings as much,' he notes. But the real prize for office sustainability is to amplify such multiplier effects with digital technology. Smart building systems can determine whether a work area is being used and—if not—shut down lighting and heating systems automatically, potentially saving massive amounts of energy. According to the Energy Efficiency Movement, more than 40 percent of the energy used in a typical commercial building is for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC)—and around 35 percent of it is wasted. However, a digital building management system with artificial intelligence can help cut HVAC emissions by up to 40 percent, while slashing 25 percent off operating costs. This is a remarkable sustainability gain, but Kjesbu has another sustainable office equipment design trick up his sleeve: making things last longer. 'If you design products that last longer, you will buy fewer and have a smaller footprint,' he says. 'It's a big difference if a product lasts four years or seven years,' he adds. In taking sustainability to heart, Cisco is staying ahead of a growing workplace trend. Sustainability is an increasingly important factor in office design,' says John Stephan, a building products and services deal advisory partner at the accountancy firm BDO. 'From building materials to office-based technologies, we are seeing a growing appetite for options that reduce waste and emissions,' he says. As far as the planet is concerned, that is a healthy appetite indeed—and one that conscious corporations such as Cisco are happy to satisfy.
