Double Robotics is one of a new generation of robotics firms that’s trying to bring the technology to the masses at a reasonable price. Its product, the ‘Double’, is a telepresence robot that uses a couple of iPads (one for control, one for the telepresence imagery) and costs $2,499, although it has a lower pre-order price of $1,999.

“[The] Double Robotics investment perfectly aligns to our strategy,” Grishin said. “It is a very consumer-oriented product with potential to fit a very wide range of applications and has already proven a strong consumer demand.”

Robots for the masses

I’d hesitate to call it a consumer product myself, but I can certainly see its application in many organizations. Telepresence has never been a cheap technology – though the cost is falling – and the Double’s use of iPads is a clever way to keep prices down.

And it seems to be working. In its first post-launch month, Double Robotics apparently picked up 600 pre-orders, equating to $1.2m, from buyers in 44 countries. According to Grishin, whose fund comprises his own cash, the first customers include 24 universities and 17 Fortune 500 companies.

That interest has led to scaling problems, which is where Grishin’s cash – the first to be parcelled out since the fund launched – comes in. With the first run already sold out, the fresh injection should allow the second set to be delivered early next year. It also looks like there may be further play between Grishin and Double in the future.

“We are thrilled to have Grishin Robotics and Dmitry Grishin, in particular, as our largest investor to date,” Double Robotics co-founder David Cann said. “After our public launch in August, we met with Grishin Robotics and were immediately impressed with their mission and deep knowledge of the robotics industry’s past mistakes and potential future. We look forward to working with Grishin Robotics in the years to come as we build our business.”

Here’s a reminder of what the Double looks like:

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For starters, the $9,700 QB robot from Anybots is much cheaper than Curiosity, but it’s still beyond the reach of mainstream consumers. It’s really meant for enterprise solutions to be used as a virtual greeter or even for students to “attend” school when they’re not well enough to be there in person. The QB robot is similar to a self-balancing Segway device, but adds a small display, camera sensors and a microphone.

Nearly ten grand is still too much money for most people. What does just 20 percent of that price get you? If you have an iPad — and $1,995 — it gets you a similar product from Double Robotics, says PhysOrg. Last week, the company announced pre-orders for its “Double” robot, which uses a similar self-balancing mechanism to that of the more expensive QB robot, but you add the sensors. How? Double has a mounting bracket for an iPad, which provides connectivity, a camera, speaker and microphone: Everything you need to “be” somewhere else.

Double isn’t just a name for the robot though, since you’ll need not one, but two iPads for it. One is used on the robot itself, while the other is used to control the Double and see or hear what it’s experiencing. That hasn’t put off interested buyers, however: The first production run of Double robots is already sold out and new pre-orders won’t ship until next year.

But maybe even $2,000 and two iPads is too pricey. No worries, because there’s a Kickstarter project that’s nearly funded and all it will cost is $299 to get a telepresence robot. The Botiful uses nearly any Android phone for the robot’s eyes and ears, while a small three-wheeled base moves Botiful around.

Since the project isn’t yet funded — it has $85,571 of its $90,000 funding goal, with 45 hours remaining — you can still get in on the project with pledge of $245. For roughly the cost of a Google Nexus 7 tablet, you can use Botiful and your Android smartphone with Skype to magically be somewhere else.

While the prices and feature-sets of all these examples vary greatly, one aspect remains constant. The advances in smartphones and tablets — namely mobile broadband connectivity, multiple sensors and VoIP software — are enabling a new product line just as I envisioned in 2010 when I suggested then that today’s smartphones would power tomorrow’s robots (subscription required). With mobile devices working as the eyes, ears, and mouth of a robot, all that’s left is adding mobility to give movement. We’re doing that today on Mars for a few billion dollars and you can do the same today in your home or office for a fraction of that investment.

Of course, if you’ve got money to spare, you could do what Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, did when speaking on stage at an X-Prize fundraiser he couldn’t physically attend. Instead, he used a prototype Texai telepresence robot built by Willow Garage to speak to the audience in “the room next door,” he joked from Utah.

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The Oculus Surveillance and Telepresence Netbook Robot project is looking to secure $15,000 in pledges by Jan. 31. You can commit as little as $30 for an Oculus T-Shirt, $225 for a full robot kit (netbook not included) or $420 for a deluxe robot made of wood, complete with a headlight, T-shirt — for you, not the robot — and RoboRealm software. Even with the largest pledge, you’ll have to provide a netbook.

Although I’m a robot enthusiast, this project makes perfect sense. Netbooks are cheap enough and have more than enough horsepower and sensors to power a robot. I suspect that while many netbook owners still use their device as a traditional laptop, others have moved on to tablets or other mobile devices. That means an old netbook collecting dust can gain a second life.

Using the netbook’s webcam, an Arduino board and open source software, the Oculus could work well as an inexpensive ”place shifting” solution. The robot’s owner can remotely move the robot and see what the it sees, while communicating with other people over the web through a netbook’s integrated microphone and speakers. The Oculus even has a charging dock that it can back into on its own.

Note that this isn’t the first netbook-powered robot potentially hitting the market. Willow Garage has long offered the TurtleBot that combines a netbook with a Roomba iCrate base and an Xbox Kinect. As a result, you’ll pay much more for that solution; $1399 for a full kit including the netbook.

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The decision comes after Cisco killed off its Flip line of video cameras in April, part of a big restructuring as the company began focusing more on its core strengths. At the time, Cisco said it would move Umi into the business Telepresence line and sell it through an enterprise and service provider go-to-market model. That signaled the beginning of the end for Umi. Cisco actually stopped selling the devices last month, and retailer Best Buy has recently been heavily discounting units to move them.

“While we are ending the sale of Umi, the Umi service remains unchanged,” a Cisco spokesperson said in an email to CRN. “Existing customers will continue to be able to use the service to make calls to other Umi subscribers or to Google video chat accounts.”

It’s a further sign that Cisco is rethinking its consumer efforts, which have not paid off in the way the company had hoped. After Cisco killed off the Flip line, Cisco CEO John Chambers said the company would be focusing its consumer strategy on helping its enterprise and service-provider customers optimize and expand their offerings for consumers.

The failure of Umi is not much of a surprise. We called the $599 system a nonstarter when it launched in Oct. 2010, because its price put it out of reach of most consumers. It did offer 1080p video and integrated GTalk video chat. But it came with a $25 monthly service charge, which was later reduced to $10 a month.

Umi, however, was competing with free alternatives like Skype, which is getting built into set-top boxes and TVs from Panasonic, Sony, Samsung and Vizio. And it was trying to sell stand-alone hardware in a market that was shifting toward devices that offer video chat as a feature. Also, it was generally pushing more of a closed proprietary system approach, something that works better when it’s incredibly usable, like Apple products.

By pulling back on Umi, Cisco can again focus on its core strengths in networking. In a memo to employees in April, Chambers explained that the company was focusing on five areas: core routing and switching, collaboration, cloud computing, network architectures, and video, which apparently doesn’t mean Flip or Umi. Dropping Umi also provides the benefit of not having to worry about Umi’s cannibalizing sales of Cisco’s existing enterprise conferencing systems. Umi was interoperable with Cisco’s Telepresence suite and may have been a tempting alternative to the bigger video conferencing setups.

Cisco still has a foot in the consumer market with its Linksys routers, and it continues to sell set-top boxes, but it is showing that its future is headed toward what made it big in the first place. With data traffic exploding, thanks in part to incredible mobile growth, there is still a lot of opportunity in building smart networking gear if it can regain its focus.

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The white labeling of Vidyo’s technology is nothing new: after all, it provides the secret sauce behind Google’s video chat service. And it’s working with other companies, like Ricoh, to extend its unified communications reach beyond just its own hardware-based solutions. It also powers the recently announced FuzeBox telepresence solution, which seeks to create interoperability between different video conferencing vendors and platforms.

Vidyo hopes to go even further in the near future, by enabling its customers and partners to build third-party apps based on its technology, which can then be shared and implemented by others. In a phone conversation, Vidyo CMO Ashish Gupta said the startup was working on an application portal program that would enable white label service providers to develop and reuse code created by other service providers.

Because Vidyo’s technology is cloud-based and works with multiple platforms, it gives partners flexibility to more easily reach users on devices that they otherwise would have had to otherwise spend expensive resources developing for. While several Vidyo customers fall under the traditional telepresence customer bracket, several more are service providers that have built Vidyo-enabled conferencing services on top of their legacy business.

This is especially true in vertical industries like healthcare or finance, where partners are creating consumer-facing applications based on the Vidyo technology. Take, for example, the case of a service provider in the Nordic states, which has built a video chat app for seniors that has a simple one-touch remote to initiate chats. Or a partner in the financial services field that has built an application to enable its clients to video chat with questions if they need to.

Right now, these are one-off opportunities. But by creating an app exchange, Vidyo can leverage existing code to make it easier for partners to build these types of business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) applications. Partners get an easy on-ramp to build new services, and Vidyo gets a transparent way to sell more licenses. While service providers ultimately handle all the billing and operations for any platforms they build on Vidyo technology, the startup gets a license fee for any end users actually conferencing on apps enabled by it.

In that way, Vidyo hopes to leverage the network effect of making its technology more widely available. “If ten people use a Vidyo service, and they connect to ten people, then we’ve gained 100 users,” Gupta said.

Vidyo has raised a total of $73.5 million since being founded in 2005. That includes a $25 million financing round last spring led by Four Rivers Group and including Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds and Star Ventures, as well as an $11.5 million round raised earlier this year.

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Video conferencing and online meeting provider FuzeBox announced a new product Wednesday, Fuze Telepresence Connect, which hopes to overcome these interoperability problems by enabling its Fuze Meeting product to act as a gateway between Tandberg, Polycom and LifeSize telepresence systems. It can also extend telepresence across iPads, Android tablets, PCs and Macs, making it available to an entire workforce.

Telepresence Connect offers:

• Scalable multiparty HD video conferencing. High resolution and high frame rate encode and decode at multiple frame rates and resolutions.
• Standards-based encoding technology. H.264/AVC/SVC based.
• Error resilience and localization. Maintains continuous high-quality video without broken pictures or other artifacts in environments with high packet loss, while individual client network errors do not affect other conference participants
• Resolution and rate matching. Supports sending video to multiple endpoints with different bandwidths and resolution capabilities, without transcoding.
• Dynamic rate control. Automatically and continuously senses the current network condition and adjusts bit rates accordingly
• Firewall/NAT traversal. Embedded functionality that provides a safe and secure connection through any firewall with no feature loss and no additional equipment required.

I’ve seen a demo of Telepresence Connect in Fuze Meeting, and it was impressive, enabling connection to and switching between several telepresence rooms, as well as simultaneous desktop HD video conferencing with several participants. It also provides access to Fuze Meeting’s built-in collaboration tools, such as file viewing, annotation and screen sharing. The seamless connection to various telepresence rooms was particularly pleasing, as typically setting up a telepresence meeting session is not straightforward. I also liked the intuitive Fuze Meeting interface, which enables users to determine the layout of the conferencing screen, choosing which video feeds to highlight or bring to the front — something that’s not usually possible in MCU-based telepresence conferences.

FuzeBox’s new product is not the only cloud-based gateway that can connect telepresence systems. Vidtel, used by the MondoPad device I wrote about last week, also claims to offer “any-to-any” HD video conferencing, for example. However, Fuze Meeting with Telepresence Connect is the only product that works across H.323, SIP and H.264 and can also connect to tablet devices as well as PCs and Macs, and is also the only product to have built-in, easy-to-use conferencing and collaboration tools. Installation of Fuze Telepresence Connect starts at $18,000, with 20 percent annual maintenance fees. That may sound expensive, but it is pretty small compared to the investment required for a typical telepresence setup.

A potential issue for FuzeBox’s new product is the effort vendors are now making to improve interoperability themselves, with most new gear now adhering to either the TIP or H.323 standards, while Cisco, for example, announced an update to its TC and  CTS software Tuesday that will be available later this year and extends interoperability with all standards-based endpoints. So has FuzeBox’s product come too late to market? I don’t think so; the telepresence vendors have been sluggish in their attempts to improve interoperability and there are plenty of existing, legacy telepresence installations out there that companies would like to squeeze more usage and life out of.

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Telecom giant Alcatel Lucent’s research and development arm Bell Labs is hoping to replicate the feeling of in-person interaction with a fascinating concept it calls Immersive Communications. It differs from existing video products by using “mixed reality,” using cloud-based processing to insert the video feeds of real people into customizable artificial environments, and may offer some insight into what video communications may look like in the near future, as this promotional video shows:

Immersive Communications uses cloud-based video processing to take the video feeds from each user’s camera and remove the backgrounds — using facial tracking and other technologies to obviate the green screen background normally required in traditional chroma key applications — and then inserts that processed video into a virtual world.

This mixed reality environment means that, for example, instead of having a series of separate windows for multiparty video calls, all of the participants can be naturally brought together into a virtual space — perhaps seated around an artificial boardroom table. It also means that documents and other digital elements (whiteboards, for example) can be brought into the virtual space for collaboration, and even manipulated using gestural control.  Immersive Communications is perhaps similar to using virtual environments such as Second Life for conducting meetings, but, crucially, instead of making use of unrealistic avatars, the system uses video to give users an impression of natural “face-to-face” communications.

While the promotional video certainly looks exciting, with its Minority Report-style gesture control, Bell Labs thinks that the Immersive Communications concept has practical application, and addresses several shortcomings with the current crop of video chat offerings:

• Better user experience. Most current video chat applications take too many steps to get up and running and initiate a call. Immersive communications encourages spontaneous, intuitive connections from any device.
• Minimal client hardware requirements. Unlike expensive telepresence systems, Immersive Communications doesn’t have elaborate hardware or infrastructure requirements; all the video processing is done in the cloud. It will use thin clients (Flash-based browser apps, native apps for devices that don’t support Flash, and likely HTML5 web apps in the future), which means that it can be easily used by remote workers, and can also be accessed on mobile devices.
• Natural communication. Traditional multiparty video chat applications generally present each person in a separate window. This is unnatural, and can become confusing, especially as the number of participants increases. Placing the participants into an artificial environment allows for much more natural communication.
• Privacy protection. Automatic background extraction protects the privacy of participants.

In addition to the obvious uses for Immersive Communications in the enterprise, Bell Labs also sees many other potential applications for the concept, such as in remote learning, gaming and social media.

Immersive Communications has no definitive launch date yet. One stumbling block to commercial release could be the server requirements. Having the heavy lifting of the video processing done in the cloud is necessary if the concept is to work on multiple platforms, including mobile devices, but even though Bell Labs says it has developed a highly efficient virtualized GPU, real-time background extraction and processing video on a commercial scale would require considerable server resource, particularly if Bell Labs’ vision of a product that could be used as part of social networking tools were to be realized. (If you’re interested in the cloud computing and infrastructure technologies that support projects like Immersive Communications, you should really check out our Structure conference later this month).

According to Alcatel Lucent’s Marketing Director Thomas Kallstenius, early feedback on the concept has been good, however, and the company is currently undergoing usability trials to see what aspects of it should be brought to market. So while the first Immersive Communications product may not end up exactly as depicted in the promo video (gesture control is intriguing, but may not be all that usable, useful or relevant in many applications, for example), it’s likely that we will see a commercial product based on this concept soon.

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But the move also looks like the first indications of cracks in the high-end video conferencing space, as companies weigh the costs versus the benefits of deploying high-end, expensive telepresence when they could offer good-enough solutions via Skype, Polycom or others. Plus, with its LifeSize division, Polycom’s no slouch at providing decent-quality video conferencing. And those are far cheaper, which means workers can actually telecommute from home offices using them as opposed to driving into a satellite office to use the fancy Halo or teleprescence gear. Using a cheaper desktop videoconferencing or even an application on a mobile device makes sense for the way the future of work and communications is heading.

But back to this deal, which was rumored to be worth a paltry $89 million, a real come down for the Halo business. With the acquisition, the two companies have also agreed to enter into a broad strategic alliance in which Polycom will serve as an exclusive partner to HP for telepresence and certain video UC solutions for both resale and internal HP deployments. Additionally, Polycom’s video applications will be made available for HP’s WebOS platform. This could be the beginning of an application as opposed to a high-end video conferencing system.

HP had only just launched a new line of HD videoconferencing products last November, but Polycom is a leader in the unified communications market with a much broader range of UC products that work on Polycom hardware as well as eventually working on other devices. This begs the question of how long Cisco might push telepresence?

The deal will give Polycom access to HP’s technology while extending its reach to HP’s installed base of visual collaboration products, while HP will be able to resell Polycom’s broad range of UC equipment, infrastructure and software. The deal is due to close in the third quarter of this year.

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When its Umi telepresence service was introduced last November, we argued that Cisco would have a difficult time with consumer adoption due to the high price of the hardware and for the service. Predictably, at $599 for a dedicated set-top box and $24.99 a month to use the service, Cisco hasn’t hit the mainstream; a blog post today notes that “thousands” of people have chosen the technology. The problem is that success in the mainstream consumer realm isn’t defined by having thousands of users, or even tens of thousands of users, but by having millions of users.

Here are just a few of the problems with Cisco’s consumer telepresence strategy both at launch and now:

Competing with free

While Cisco is charging for consumer telepresence in the living room, multiple other providers are making their basic video chat services available for free. We’ve already seen Cisco pull back from this strategy to some extent, slashing the price of the Umi service from $24.95 to $9.95 a month or $99.95 a year. And the Mac and PC clients that Cisco plans to launch later this year will be free. At the same, however, Skype is aggressively making its free video chat service available on TVs and connected devices from the likes of Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Vizio.

No market for a standalone box

Cisco’s hardware strategy is also a limitation for the company; its business model relies on selling standalone boxes that enable high-quality video chat on TVs. Umi telepresence theoretically makes any TV into a chat-enabled TV, but the market for standalone devices is quickly disappearing. As noted above, TVs from multiple manufacturers are being sold with Skype and other video chat services as a feature, with the purchase of a compatible USB-powered video camera. At some point, we expect Umi to be integrated into Cisco set-top boxes that are deployed by pay TV operators like Verizon, but until that happens, it’s difficult to justify buying another box to use the service.

“Good enough” is good enough for most consumers

Other entrants in the market might not boast the 1080p HD video quality that Cisco is selling with Umi — but then again, they don’t have to. Cisco has perhaps even realized this, with the release of its lower-priced 720p offering. Part of the issue is that many consumers don’t have enough bandwidth to fully take advantage of the 1080p HD quality delivered by Umi. That has been corrected, in part, with a 720p option that tops out at 1.5Mbps upstream. But even that quality might be aggressive for most video conference users, even those who are chatting on a big-screen TV. When forced to choose between a high-quality offering that they pay for and a lower quality offering that is free, most consumers will go for the free, “good enough” option.

Cannibalizing its enterprise telepresence business

While we’ve argued that Umi’s price tag has held it back as a consumer offering, the biggest issue with the service isn’t that its price was too high for consumers, but that it has the potential to cannibalize Cisco’s high-margin enterprise conferencing business. Cisco only reinforced that issue, making Umi interoperable with its enterprise product, and therefore an even more attractive alternative. No longer will enterprises have to choose between Cisco’s full-featured telepresence suite or to deploy the lesser Umi system; it can now deploy telepresence rooms in main offices and use Umi for remote networking with home offices. That might sound like a win for Cisco, but it also means that some businesses will eschew the enterprise product and choose solely to roll out Umi’s consumer offering instead.

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The new HP products include:

• HP Visual Collaboration Desktop. A client that can be installed on users’ own laptops and desktops. The software offers flexible bandwidth management with scalable video coding.
• HP Visual Collaboration Executive Desktop. A bundled touchscreen product. It features an HP TouchSmart 600Qm All-in-One pre-loaded with the HP Visual Collaboration software, and includes a camera and headset accessories.
• HP Visual Collaboration Room 100 and Room 220 provide high-quality video in conference rooms. As it’s portable, it can be moved from room to room if required.
• HP Visual Collaboration Studio. A top-of-the-range offering that offers three-screen immersive solutions and features broadcast-quality cameras and lenses.

Because the server infrastructure is software-based, HP says that it should reduce total cost of ownership and eliminate the need for a multipoint control unit (MCU). This infrastructure can be on-premise, hosted or offered in the cloud by service providers. The Visual Collaboration Gateway can interface with both H.323 and SIP protocols, so it will offer a migration path for companies wanting to continue to use their legacy videoconferencing equipment. HP’s existing Halo products, which run on a dedicated network, will continue to be offered as an option for customers looking for a fully managed solution.

HP’s Visual Collaboration line will be sold by HP and selected partners. It’s available now; full details of the product line can be found here.

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