A Peek Into the Meeting Room of the Future

 By E.J. Siwek, CMP

You walk into the meeting room, accompanied by “Belinda,” your meeting’s designated android.  She has been absolutely charming on your stroll through the lobby. Upon arrival, she smiled, greeted you by name, and even had your favorite beverage waiting. In her hand she held your schedule for the day, as well as an up-to-the minute list of e-mails and a series of faxes you need for the meeting. (Not that you asked, but she even tells you how your last few stock trades have gone.)

As you enter meeting room, you see your work team assembled at a fully equipped conference table. You also notice the modern style of artwork hanging throughout the room. (Strange that last month, when your mind wandered to plans for your upcoming vacation, the art in the same room was different … a peaceful setting.) As you move closer, you reach out to shake the hand of the team leader. As you make contact, it feels spiritual and ghost-like, not the tight and firm handshake your Dad taught you to use. Instead, it’s cleaner and softer, and when you reach out to place your left hand on the leader’s other shoulder, it passes right through!

That’s when it dawns on you: The meeting room is full of 3-D holograms. While you seem to be surrounded by members of your team, they haven’t traveled to the meeting in the “real” sense that we understood in the year 2000. Instead, the participants in this meeting (none of whom speak or understand the same language) are being broadcast from local meeting centers throughout the world.

Is this a dream … or a nightmare?

Let’s step back for a moment to the year 2000. That summer, Australia didn’t just play host to the Summer Olympics; it also played host to “RoboCup 2000,” an event that attracted robots from around the world for an indoor soccer tournament.  (The ultimate goal was to provide robots with enough intelligence and human-type senses to handle multiple instructions from different people in a crowd.)  According to an article in Wired magazine (“At Home with the Androids,” September 2000), there are several similar robotic projects going on around the world.  In all of them, the robots have names and a sense of purpose … or at least their project leaders do. Most of these projects involve upper torso movement, neuroscience, and robot/human communication through robots with human-like faces.

Make no mistake: These advances in artificial intelligence, mechanical engineering, and other fields involved with perfecting the ideal robot are moving ahead at light speed. “Belinda” and  other service robots will surely be a force to deal with in the future.

Robotics aside, there are other technologies and devices already at our fingertips that will reengineer the meeting room of the future.  Take the cell phone, for example. The cell phone of the future will serve multiple functions beyond simple phone service by providing Internet searching ability, banking, and currency exchange, among other things. In effect, these devices will be high-tech credit and debit cards rolled into one.  Cell phones will also displace the electronic survey devices currently in use today.

The look and feel of a cell phone will also change.  The design will be a marriage of a Palm-type device and a miniature phone.  Today, you can already review your conference or meeting agenda on your palm device; tomorrow, its computing power will exceed that of today’s laptop. This hand-held device will be entirely wireless. It will use infrared and laser technologies and may even be able to draw its power from your own body heat! And it will be secured by your own palm print.

Furnishing meeting room computing power greater than that provided by hand-held devices will be an emerging generation of headgear units. Already in test labs, these lightweight units will process voice into data and then have the intelligence to translate it into any language known to man, woman, or robot. The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence already has a consortium of 23 universities and corporations engaged in a project entitled, “Vermobil,” an effort focused on translating German to and from Japanese or English … principally to make travel planning and meeting arrangements.  Once this technology is perfected, it will interface with virtually all communications devices.  Currently, there are at least 20 other major, worldwide projects on speech recognition under way.

The handwriting is on the wall. Studies show that by 2003, only one-third of all Internet users will reside in the United States. As a result, all business communications will need to be multilingual and instantly translatable.

The final frontier is the speed at which we are able to transmit and receive signals.  Will we be able to readily transmit images such as the 3-D holograms described above?  It is certainly well within the imagination, especially as advanced computing power nears transmission of data at the speed of light. Just this summer, AT&T Bell Labs acknowledged research using DNA strands as “wiring” for a new computer chip.  While this technology could still be 10 to 20 years away, according to Bell Labs, it could power a computer that is 1,000 times faster than those we have today!

Where is all of this leading us?  Will the day come when we send robotic “stand-ins” to meetings? Perhaps not. But based on my research for this article, a marriage of humans, robots, and still-unimagined new technology certainly seems achievable within our lifetimes. Taking what is already known -- and integrating the elements of virtual reality, advanced computing power, and worldwide research and development efforts — will radically transform traditional meetings and the meeting room of the future.

E.J. Siwek is director of marketing of Excel Partnership, an international training organization, and president and founder of Flashpoint Technologies, LLC. Forward your questions about technology to him at techeditor@pcma.org.

CONVENE - December 2000 - Meeting Technology

©2000 Professional Convention Management Association