23 April 2009 | Posted inBlog News & Updates, Featured, In the Studio, Sustainable Design
TeleThunder is Here!
Certain HOK-ers (ahem, John Gilmore ) have been bragging about HOK’s very cool new collaboration technology: the Advanced Collaboration Room, which combines Cisco Telepresence Technology and Polyvision Thunder Express. Well, John, you are no longer the only cool kid in town! The WDC office became the fourth HOK office to open it’s ACR for business. St. Louis, San Francisco, and Toronto already had them…next on the list are Houston, Los Angeles, and London.
ACR under construction
Demolition (and caution tape) in the hallway between my desk and the new ACR
After a few solid weeks of construction, the ACR was ready for business just in time for the HOK Board Meeting. The ACR is anticipated to help us collaborate more closely with our colleagues in other offices, maximize meeting times, and, greenest of all, reduce our travel and carbon emissions! Oh, and we may save a few dollars, too. While the ACR isn’t cheap, our friends at Cisco have told us that in some of their installations the payback for Telepresence Rooms is as little as 3 months!
Air traffic controller headphones to protect my ears from the drilling!
My desk is about 15′ away from the new ACR, and I’ll admit that it kind of sucked sitting that close during build out (and gave me new empathy to all of our clients living through renovations). Now it’s open, I’m trained, and can’t wait to get in there and start collaborating with my HOK colleagues. Maybe I can even get John and Rachel to set up a WDC vs. STL virtual recycolympics?!
WDC advanced collaboration room in action (see if you can find me in the photo)!
Check out 5 Questions for Esther Simon to learn about the woman who brought the WDC ACR into existence!
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We have the Thunder in Houston… but not the tele-thunder… But to be honest… no one here really uses the thunder anyway… I used it once to draw sand castle competition concepts… haha best use it ever got!!
I attended a demonstrative session back in St. Louis a couple of months ago and it was AMAZING.. we need this in Asia Pacific!! (Especially for me when i miss St. Louis..)