TelePresence Animation

About This Project

I created an 3-screen animation which runs at the end of a video call on the Cisco IX5000 TelePresence endpoint. This endpoint has 3, 70″ screens with a total image area almost 15′ wide and 4′ tall. The challenge was to tell a story in 4 seconds while attaching the Cisco brand to the message. An additional challenge was because the user is 8 feet from the screen, on-screen motion effects were intensified and had to be subtle or risk making users motion sick. I built this project in AfterEffects, starting with a video composition of 5842 x 1080 pixels (3 x 1920 = 5760 + 82 pixels to compensate for the two inside bezels between the displays). This composition was then exported as 3 separate 1080p video streams. The video and audio files are synced at playback by the IX5000 when the call ends.

There were technical challenges to completing this project around data rate causing in off-sync issues and image quality degradation. The IX5000 software was not written with this kind of video capability in mind, so we had to do extensive experimentation of compression, object motion, and especially judicious use of gradients to strike the right balance. On the creative side, there were numerous stakeholders with input on this project, including the UE Design manager, Product manager, Engineering manager, Software manager, and the Lead Industrial designer. Pictured below are some alternative designs that were proposed and tested. This was an intensely iterative process to reach consensus on the final 4 second video that shipped with the system.