Technology continues to impact the look and feel of off-site meetings. If you’re still debating the appropriateness of live tweeting at your conferences or training sessions, you’d better let someone else plan them.
A recent report from Meeting Professionals International entitled “Technology: Why Invest and What’s Next” examines new tools they say could revolutionize meetings. MPI offers these tips for not getting left behind.
- Even with the advent of telepresence and virtual simulation, there will always be a need for face-to-face meetings. But technology will change how those meetings are conducted and delivered.
- Augmented reality (AR) will transform face-to-face meeting spaces into portals to information, in the short-term through mobile devices and in the long-term through specialized display glasses.
- Targeted audio will provide a multitude of simultaneous audio sources to different physical locations in a meeting space, thereby enabling meetings to convey auditory information in different spaces.
- Networked mobile devices will replace the use of laptop computers, providing all the material related to a meeting and replacing the need for paper. In addition, they will serve as communication portals, allowing for delegate feedback. They will provide location-aware context and personalized information to users.
- Hybrid meetings will benefit from technologies that automate the process of translating face-to-face meeting activities into online representations (computer vision, speech and voice recognition). These technologies will be used to create a representation of the physical meeting in a virtual space for distance participants. Progress in bandwidth and usability will make hybrid meetings more commonplace in the future.
The full report from MPI addresses how computer vision, ambient intelligence, speech recognition and artificial intelligence — even robotics — will affect your meetings in the next 10 to 20 years. It is available free to MPI members and for $99 for non-members at mpiweb.org/store/6361.
