Alice GustafsonA newly renovated space on the Fujitsu campus in Silicon Valley acts as a physical point of contact for Open Innovation Gateway, designed to facilitate meaningful opportunities for face-to-face collaboration between a wide range of individuals and organisations.
What the Open Innovation Gateway required was an advanced collaboration tool to enable interactions in both virtual and physical spaces. The staff were accustomed to conventional video conferencing facilities, which they found often proved disruptive due to bad connections and poor video quality.
However after seeing a demonstration of Mezzanine, Open Innovation Gateway knew it was the solution for them, noting that Mezzanine’s Infopresence capabilities were crucial to providing an immersive, collaborative and data-rich environment in which all participants and stakeholders, whether in Japan or in San Francisco, could contribute to accelerated decision-making, better analysis of key business data and real-time collaborative editing and annotating of documents.
“Infopresence is this idea that the data is present all around you in a three dimensional information space, and that you and someone in a remote location can be swimming in the same information by using a Mezzanine system,” says Dave Marvit, innovation strategy consultant at Open Innovation Gateway.
“The first time I saw Oblong’s tool, I was honestly surprised. I was surprised that so much information can be shared, beyond time and space, and be mixed and matched to create truly innovative ideas,” adds Hiroyuki Sakai, EVP, head of global marketing at Fujitsu.
Mezzanine at Open Innovation Gateway boasts six Samsung ED65D Narrow Bezel Monitors screens, three in a landscape configuration to provide a wide space on which to share ideas and documents, and three screens installed vertically on the adjacent wall in a corkboard formation. The system also uses a Cisco SX20 VTC Codec to provide high definition and reliable video conferencing. Using one of Mezzanine’s wands, users can move content, video and images around any of the screens, zoom in and expand crucial elements, and add their own content to the screens.
Remote workers can view everything that’s happening in the Mezzanine portal, accessible from a web browser or iOS app, and add their own content to the discussion – all while participating via videoconference.
“I find it really useful to be able to snap a picture of a document, put it in the Mezzanine portfolio and share it up on the screen,” Dave continues. “That’s huge, because it means that the paper world and digital world are no longer separated. At a certain point in video conferences with remote partners, the documents and the information that you’re exchanging become more important. With Mezzanine you can move the video conference feed to one side and then expand the documents and data and examine those in detail together. Mezzanine generates all kinds of new capabilities by being able to bridge the Pacific Ocean in real time meetings and real time collaboration.”