Collaborate the old fashion way - in a conference room... but the Meetiim from Immersion, the French VR experts, gives you the conference room of the future.
You could be forgiven if you thought that a conference room table with a large-format display built in was a gimmick. Trust PW, it is not. The visualization experts at Immersion in Bordeaux have been developing this tool for several years and the functionality for connecting, sharing and collaborating is extensive.
Look at how we work today - everything is digital. All of your work information is on your computer, tablet or phone. In the first step, Meetiiim solves that problem for the people sitting around the table together. Everyone can connect any device or computer.
This can be any computer on the network, and that computer can then be controlled from Meetiiiim. So imagine that you connect your workstation and walk through your project right on the table top. This could be your laptop which you have with you - connect it to Meetiiim and share your computer with everyone around the table. And if you have your notes or presentation on your tablet? The same thing.
Your team meeting is not limited by the size of the conference room or the proximity of your team. Meetiiim with its collaboration and sharing software lets you connect remote team members, stream live video, and share their computers. Everyone participates fully in the meeting.
The advantages of making people, computers, data, and applications completely sharable among team members allows any meeting to become more effective and productive. It provides advantages in sharing for people in the same room as well as for those in remote locations.
Meetiiim consists of a 55" 4K resolution tactile display, an integrated computer with NVIDIA graphics, a Xeon processor, 16 GB of memory and an SSD or HDD drive. The software, named appropriately "Shariiing", that drives the benefits of Meetiiim is developed by Immersion. The table has connectivity for USB, DVI, networks (RJ45), mini-jack in/out, WIFI, and AC power for participants.
The solution costs 30,000€. You might be able to imagine a table paying for itself in a matter of months just from the savings in travel costs much less the savings in travel time or the increased productivity and collaboration. It would not be hard to imagine a Meetiiim conference room in each company office as a solution to dramatically reduce travel time and expense.
Immersion has indicated that the Meetiiim software, "Shariiing", will be enhanced to add more devices this year. Given that Immersion is specialized in VR and AR technologies, it should not be a surprise that the company plans to add HMD support soon.
The PW Perspective
At PW, we suspect that many of our readers lament the time lost in meetings. Meetiiin won't fix a poor organization, but it will greatly improve the meeting productivity for a good organization. If you are in a company that works with teams in different locations - and who is not - then just one table could return its own cost in travel savings within a few months. And while increased productivity, more effective meetings, and a happier project team is hard to quantify for most companies, travel time and travel expense savings are easy to justify. Of course what makes the Meetiiim so useful is the well thought out design combined with Immersion's collaboration software. This collaboration tool is definitely worth a look.