Augmented Collaboration: A Cisco Tech Fund Innovation

Hi all,

The DevNet team is busy gearing up for DevNet at Cisco Live in San Francisco on May 18-22. It’s just 2 days away… Yikes! I just got off a call with the DevNet team and you can imagine the excitement and nervousness in the air as we’re in the final days of preparation. We’ll have awesome hands-on labs, a 24 hour hackathon, and theater presentations on lots of fun topics. There will be a lot for developers to do with software-defined networking (APIC EM and onePK), location-aware wireless (Connected Mobile Experience CMX), Internet of Things (IOx), Collaboration (Jabber Guest), network topology UI (NeXt), and data center (UCS director). I know that’s a lot of acronyms, so I’ll write more about these next week. But, I wanted to quickly tell you about another innovation that we will be showing publicly for the first time at Cisco Live!

While my DevNet team is working hard, my Innovation team is busy gearing up for Cisco Live too. We’ll be showing an innovation project that we’ve been quietly working on for the last two years which just got some press in eWeek and in Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Our innovation project is on Augmented Collaboration, which is a user experience innovation and technology innovation around next-generation collaboration. You probably know of Cisco’s TelePresence, WebEx, and Unified Communications products and hopefully you’ve used them. I’m a huge fan of immersive video collaboration and I’ve built teams across the oceans using this technology. Augmented Collaboration is an exploration on “what’s next” in collaboration.

Our project name is Project Spring Roll. The name came from the fact that this was a Cisco Tech Fund project was approved in the spring and we use agile methods with rolling iterations. And, spring rolls are tasty and the name has a bit of an Asian flair, which matches my innovation team which is based in Shanghai.

We took an experience-driven approach to Augmented Collaboration. We started with the problem statement, which was to enable a truly interactive video and content collaboration experience for people across geographies. We then jumped into the experience design, thinking hard about what people do and how we could help them solve the problem. We then did our technology innovations to build a system that delivered that experience.

We then developed Project Spring Roll, which is the immersive augmented collaboration experience which is shown in the pictures below.

Spring Roll/Augmented Collaboration has a number of features:

• Head-to-toe TelePresence Video
• Seamless integration of video communication and interactive content collaboration
• Shoulder-to-shoulder whiteboard collaboration
• TelePresence and WebEx integration

When you do innovations like this, you never really know how they’re going to turn out. It’s the nature of innovation. I have to say, I’m really proud of the team because the solution we created is a very compelling user experience.

Augmented Collaboration is one of those things where you have to experience it to really get a feel for it’s impact. So, I’m excited to announce that we will have Spring Roll set up in the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live in San Francisco on May 18-22. This will be the first time that we have Spring Roll in a public location.

Please note that Spring Roll/Augmented Collaboration is not a product. Rather, it’s an innovation that allows us to explore new user experiences and technologies, and hopefully we learn more about whether people value the experience and over time we will decide if it should be a product.

Putting my DevNet hat back on… please register for DevNet to see Spring Roll and other cool Cisco technologies. And, if you’re already planning to attend Cisco Live, then please come by the DevNet Zone to take a look at Spring Roll.

Thanks!

Susie