In a post on its Office blog, Microsoft has announced a new initiative they are taking with Skype for Business, calling it Project Rigel. Project Rigel is aimed at bringing the impressive collaborative abilities of the Surface Hub to the standard corporate meeting room.
According to Microsoft, over 97% of meeting rooms currently contain a projector or display and only a telephone for bringing in remote participants. This has the effect of creating a suboptimal experience for those remote users with no opportunity for interaction with meeting content or a whiteboard. To solve this problem Microsoft is partnering up with Polycom and Logitech to bring the immersive interactive meeting capabilities of Skype for Business to these meeting rooms, with Windows 10 devices at the center of it.
The Surface Hub, which has yet to begin shipping, promises to offer this rich meeting experience in a single package with users able to seamlessly interact with content on a large touch screen while displaying that content in real-time to all the participants of the Skype meeting. With Project Rigel, Microsoft aims to expand that capability to devices produced by multiple hardware partners and we should be seeing these new systems in the second half of 2016.
Source: Microsoft