21st Century meeting room...already on its way? (Score 1)

I've been looking at this kind of question for the last 10 years from two perspectives. first as a systems design consultant helping architects plan the kind of room you're describing, and later as a graduate student at Stanford. Based on that, I'll throw in my $0.02.

A lot of the comments on this thread have pointed to specific hardware (Smart Boards, webcams, Polycom VSX/Tandberg 6000, AMX/Crestrong control systems) or software (WebEx, iChat, breeze, LiveMeeting etc.) solutions. The problem with hardware solutions is that they are often expensive, unwieldy, and most of the time oriented toward the presentation of information rather than the ability to collaboratively work with it. Software, on the other hand, tends to provide only a metaphorical approximation to the realities of collaboration in a hybrid physical/digital environment. (e.g. Most software solutions don't REALLY provide a shared whiteboard. They provide a shared paint program with a white background. It's NOT the same thing.) The reality is that any room is going to be a collection of hardware and software solutions. The problem is that most vendors are designing only a portion of the total solution, and so the integrated experience of using all these systems is often not satisfying OR successful.

Another problem with most of the collaboration software out there is that it is being designed for individuals to use while sitting at their PC, instead of for groups in conference rooms. Using these in group settings is problemmatic. Either group members need to give verbal commands to a single person driving the projected display, or the meeting is forced into a "present only" mode.

For the kind of "easy to use" environment your CEO asked for (and that all of us really want....), you need to create a situation where people can walk in, connect in to the room systems, and then start working together. You want powerful tools to work with the actual information, not just push the video to a large display at the front (esp. where one person drives, while everyone else just watches.) You want a collaboration system that works independently of the software applications running there. And, you want it to accommodate the physical qualities of the room as well as the digital capabilities.

I was a member of a team of researchers working on such questions at Stanford. We were looking at ways to support co-located and distributed (group-to-group, where each was at a different site) teams working on engineering design tasks as well as other collaborative activities. Some of that technology is now being commercialized, so more functional group collaboration in conference rooms may get here sooner than you might think. In fact, Stanford has a basic trial setup in place that is open for use by student teams in its undergraduate library (see: http://teamspace.stanford.edu/). Other institutions, and some companies, are also deploying it in their environments.

The big shortcoming of a lot of the collaboration technology (hardware and software) out in the marketplace today is that it doesn't respond to the way people want to work. Before we see things improve, the folks who design the products are going to have to become willing to learn more about the realities of interaction in a physical meeting and then develop technologies that appropriately respond to the real needs. Metaphors for "awareness," "shared whiteboards," and "work rooms" that require everybody to interact with one another through their PC aren't going to get us there.