Image courtesy of Deron Yamada. © 2004 DYA367.

In 2001, DreamWorks Animation released Shrek, which broke box office records and went on to win the first-ever Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film. To further its success, the DreamWorks Animation team set an aggressive goal of releasing two animated films per year -- a huge challenge considering it typically takes three years to complete an animated film. To meet this goal, DreamWorks Animation needed a way to overcome the difficulty of limited talent availability within the animation industry and surpass another huge obstacle, geography.

DreamWorks faced a problem as the company’s story, animation and production teams were spread across two campuses -- in Glendale and Redwood City, California -- nearly 350 miles apart. While DreamWorks was planning for Shrek 2, Andrew Adamson, the director of Shrek, had also committed to The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and was unavailable to travel back and forth from Glendale to Redwood City. To surmount this “ogre” of a problem, DreamWorks Animation ceo, Jeffrey Katzenberg, challenged his team of technology experts to develop a solution that would allow teams at both of DreamWorks’ campuses to work together as if they were in the same room without the hassle of travel. The goal: travel less and collaborate more so the teams would be less exhausted and more creative.

Enter HP Halo, a video collaboration technology that allows meeting participants to “be there without going there.” Halo was first developed by DreamWorks Animation and then perfected and brought to market by HP.

The Science of HP Halo
The result of several years of experimentation and innovation, HP Halo is able to provide meeting participants with a natural, personal connection through innovations in design, audio and video.

The innovations contributing to this environment are intentionally subtle so that Halo meeting participants focus only on their meeting and not on the technology. The relative sizes and positions of the monitors, cameras, furniture, microphone and speakers were chosen to present an illusion that the meeting participants are seated at a common table, and look and sound to each other as if all were in the same room. The textures and colors of the walls and table, and the positions and intensity of the lighting are similarly tailored to foster this illusion.

Unlike traditional video conferencing technologies that are cumbersome to set up and even more difficult to use for meetings, Halo features an award-winning, natural user interface for establishing connections with up to four studios around the globe and controlling all studio features. As a truly turnkey solution, Halo allows users to initiate connections and utilize studio features with little or no introduction to the interface. Additionally, because Halo is a fully managed service from HP, customers don’t need to hire additional IT resources to maintain the technology.

Connecting it All -- The Halo Video Exchange Network (HVEN)
Underlying the entire Halo experience is HP Halo’s most far-reaching innovation, HVEN, a private telecommunications network that is dedicated to real-time audio and video transmission. The HVEN was created especially to transport video -- a bandwidth intense application that continues to be a challenge for corporate networks. The HVEN provides full-duplex audio visual transmission with minimal latency. It also guarantees bandwidth to ensure the image reliability and sound fidelity needed for effective human interaction.

The HVEN is the most important element that makes it easy for customers to use Halo. For example, HP’s HVEN Operations Centers provide end-to-end solution accountability and highly responsive, worldwide support, including remote diagnostics and calibration, ongoing service and repair and a 24x7 concierge service. This allows for extremely high reliability and quality of performance.

The HVEN differentiates HP Halo from its competitors who instead sell customers the networking equipment but fail to manage the service. In essence, these competitive offerings sell customers the parts to the car and tell them build to their own road. When customers purchase Halo studios, they know they’re covered, and if they have any problems, the Halo concierge is just a phone call away. Because of this, Halo is always on and always ready.