12-08-2025
What I Learned Inside A Cisco Spatial Meeting
Perhaps the most disorienting part of being in a Cisco Spatial Meeting was not the meeting itself, so much as the photograph I saw afterwards. The experience is very much physical and immersive. But the picture shows nothing more than me, sitting at my desk, wearing a headset.
The other Friday, I found myself exploring one possible evolution of virtual meetings. Wearing an Apple Vision Pro, I joined a Cisco Spatial Meeting and found myself fully immersed in a 3D environment rendered in extraordinary fidelity. Standing virtually across from me in New York City was my host. To demonstrate depth, he picked up a tape measure. Pulled sideways, it looked exactly as expected. But when he extended it toward me, it felt like it was coming right at my face, reminiscent of the effect in a 3D movie but more immediate. As the meeting progressed, he picked up various objects which he manipulated as if they were on the desk in front of me. And even though they were a thousand miles away, I could see them from all angles, inspect their components, leaving me feeling that I had been right there with them.
Cisco Spatial Meetings Go From Video Tiles T0 Distance Zero
Cisco calls this experience of virtual collaboration, where location disappears and presence takes its place by the name 'distance zero.' While traditional video conferencing has long promised to bring us together, the experience typically has an inescapable flatness that constantly reminds us, both visually and psychologically, that we are not in the same place. A tiled grid of faces, audio delays, and a lack of non-verbal nuance too often turn meaningful collaboration into transactional communication. As I have noted before, tools matter only insofar as they enable genuine human interaction; too often, the medium gets in the way.
Cisco Spatial Meetings aim to change that. Using dual-camera stereoscopic capture from Cisco's Room Bar Pro, the system transmits high-definition left- and right-eye video streams into the Vision Pro's spatial computing environment. As a result, you don't just see a face on a screen, you experience depth, dimension, and texture. It is not about being in front of a monitor watching a meeting; it's about being in the meeting itself, with the surrounding environment fading into the background.
Where Cisco Spatial Meetings Excel
Spatial meetings deliver the goal of shared attention. Between the diminution of the room and the presence of the attendees, and the ability to interact with objects in a 3D space, the result is one of being there in the same moment, engaging with the same things. This fundamentally changes the dynamics of collaboration. There is no 'Which part are you talking about?' confusion. Instead, everything just feels natural.
The applications for education are clear. Students could walk through representations of molecules, explore ancient ruins, or examine complex machinery together. We've already seen immersive XR experiences begin to transform classrooms; spatial meetings extend that potential into live, shared environments. In medical environments, clinicians can learn how to triage patients with full-dimensional awareness. In design and manufacturing environments, teams can inspect prototypes without having to ship physical parts.
In all these cases, the experience is not simply about seeing—it's about experiencing. As I discussed when covering early education pilots of Distance Zero, the immersive element fundamentally changes engagement.
In Cisco Spatial Meetings, Presence Is More Than Seeing
Distance learning does not come without its challenges. The best education is fundamentally relational, and the biggest challenge for distance learning is establishing meaningful connections between the teacher and students, as well as among students themselves.
Ironically, one of the biggest challenges is created by the device that makes the magic possible: the headset. The Vision Pro's wraparound design delivers a stunningly rich environment, but it hides much of the wearer's face. In a regular meeting, we rely on facial expressions—the quick eyebrow raise, the subtle smile, the skeptical frown—to make sense of each other's meaning.
To address this, Apple and Cisco use persona technology, creating a digital replica of your face through a short scan. The persona animates in real time, tracking expressions and mouth movements to keep your 'face' in the room. It works surprisingly well, but it's not perfect.
As I have previously discussed, what truly makes a meeting feel real isn't just the structured exchange of information, but the incidental signals that travel alongside it, such as the ambient cues, the glances, the micro-expressions. Imagine two participants, silent while a debate drones on, making eye contact and rolling their eyes at the same time. That type of connection is an integral part of in-person meetings, and unless a conferencing environment can allow for that, it will always feel that something is missing. The real test for spatial meetings will be whether they can reliably capture and convey that.
Cisco Spatial Meetings Are Easy To Deploy, Hard To Forget
Perhaps most impressively, Cisco and Apple have made deployment straightforward. With more than 28,000 Room Bar Pros already in use, the infrastructure is essentially in place. A firmware update and a Vision Pro headset are all that's needed. No special Webex license or proprietary installation is required.
Of course, we're still in the early days. Headsets will get lighter. Personas will become more expressive. Interoperability will improve. But even now, the impact is undeniable.
When my demo ended, I returned to my laptop for a standard Webex call. The contrast was immediate and jarring. Everything felt flat. Remote. Distant. Less than it could be.
Which may be the most telling endorsement I can offer.
Cisco Spatial Meetings Achieve Distance Zero
The future of meetings will not be about adding more and more features, AI or otherwise. It will be about reducing the sense of distance between participants. In that regard, Cisco Spatial Meeting and 'distance zero' have already taken a giant leap forward. Anyone who experiences this type of meeting will come away not with a sense of limitation but with excitement for what is possible.
