Ultra-Telepresence

Ultra-Telepresence. Aiding smoother human connections with near-real presence. Though there has been much debate over the relative merits of working from home versus being present in the office, it seems many businesses are falling into a hybrid working style as default.

Regardless of the pandemic’s retreat, it seems as if home offices and Zoom meetings will continue to play a key role in the working day from here on in. Many start-ups are eyeing the market for accelerating standards of telepresence. Notably, however, rather than cartoon virtual avatars, the theme this year tended to be towards introducing as much reality into remote telecommunications as possible.

Three companies of note embodied this: Nokia, HComm and Elmo. The pandemic has introduced a new set of behaviors into consumers repertoire, loosely categorized as ‘remote living’. That is not to say that e-commerce or video calls did not exist before 2020, but rather the skill of interacting with life without being present, has become much more prevalent and indeed necessary over the last three years.

However, the yearning for human contact remained throughout COVID and still does, and even now is exerting downward pressure on our tech solutions. Thus, there are lessons for brands and businesses here: namely, mediated communication should be as close to the real thing as possible. The increasing sophistication of telepresence technology demonstrates that the closer we feel the experience is to reality the more impactful it is, which has important implications for brand communications.

The future may involve ultra high quality remote consultations or detailed product demonstrations and walkarounds, but most importantly it may signal that the era of faceless customer service - a robotic chatbot or a disembodied voice in a distant call center may not survive when sophisticated tech provides a workaround..