Immersive equipment enhances meetings between New Mexico and California

The futuristic world of Star Trek’s Holodeck has been partially realized in videoconference rooms at Sandia. Holo Huddle Rooms, with one in New Mexico and in California, offer users a more immersive videoconferencing experience.

“The monitors, the displays and the sound make it feel like you’re sitting across the table from somebody, which is what we hoped to do,” said Kali O’Neil, who was part of the Videoconferencing and Collaboration Solutions team that worked on the new rooms. “It’s not more complex. It’s just better.”

Information Systems Engineering Manager Dennis Xie brought the idea to the team as a way to achieve one of the Labs’ goals of accelerating innovation while also providing a space for other workforce members to create new ideas.

“This was an opportunity for us to showcase our vision and our capability in terms of how we can demonstrate that we’re not just an installer or implementer, but we also design, engineer, research and experiment,” Dennis said.

Located on-site in Albuquerque and Livermore, the Holo Huddle Rooms provide Sandians with an eye-level camera positioned behind a viewing screen that allows for life-size virtual meetings.

The rooms provide simple step-by-step instructions, and users can quickly feel like they are sitting across a table from one another, making eye contact with coworkers 1,000 miles away.

“Anything you can do to improve collaboration, whether it’s on-site and in person or in a hybrid work environment, there’s so many different use cases at Sandia,” team member Jose Cuellar said. “Helping people improve their communication across Sandia has always been important, but especially now because people are spread out so much geographically.”

Most video calls are made with a basic webcam positioned above a computer monitor or smaller laptop screen, making it easy to feel distracted from the “person-to-person experience,” Dennis said.

“If I’m looking at you, I’m not looking at the webcam, and vice versa,” he said. “Fitting into small screens and missing things like eye contact make us realize this is an artificial environment.”

With the Holo Huddle Rooms, individuals or small groups can meet on a more personal level. The team suggested the videoconferencing rooms could be good for closer connections during a coaching or mentoring session, performance reviews, interviews or “when you really want to have a nice discussion,” Jose said.

Through fall 2024, the Holo Huddle Rooms offered a pilot program, and the team collected feedback from testers to uncover what was or wasn’t working well for users. They have since opened the rooms to all and taken that feedback, which was mostly positive, to improve features such as the user guide or lighting in the rooms.

“Pilot users filled out surveys and said they liked the feel,” Lanette Radliff said. “It did give them a more intimate environment and even a better connection with the people in the room.”

The team continues to collect feedback and use it to improve not only the Holo Huddle Rooms but also more conventional videoconference rooms. The feedback offers insight into what workforce members are thinking about when it comes to improving connections.

“It encourages a different way of thinking about videoconferencing, the art and science of perfecting technology to accommodate natural human interactions,” Dennis said.

He hopes this upgraded experience will inspire his team as well as the Labs as a whole to explore more futuristic and innovative solutions — to boldly go where no one has gone before.