Cisco Englewood Customer Briefing Center Experience

This past week I went to the Cisco Englewood Customer Briefing Center with my KidsTek class.  KidsTek teaches disadvantaged youth computer skills that they will need to be competitive in their future educational and career paths. I have been teaching for KidsTek for three and a half years and this semester I am teaching an introductory Cisco certification at Montbello High School in DPS.

In this class the students learn how to build, maintain, secure and support small office and home office networks. When the students complete the course they will have a certificate and will be on the path to getting a certification from Cisco. Training like this is not otherwise offered at Montbello and is a great opportunity for students to advance their career opportunities.

The Customer Briefing Center is set-up to be the regional display of all of the exciting new things that Cisco is doing. I found TelePresence and augmented reality to be the two technologies that stuck out for me. TelePresence is a tool that lets you have meetings using video conferencing technology that has been fine tuned for quality and experience. The room dedicated to TelePresence at Englewood office is made to match with rooms of the same size in other offices so that you look like you are in the same room. Cisco is leveraging this technology for themselves and other businesses are joining them. I found this great example on YouTube.

Augmented reality is the ability to add images and figures or other graphics to the reality that someone is looking at. If you watch foot ball on TV you have seen the yellow first down line that they augment on the screen. We will also see lots of this in the Olympics in the next few weeks as they show where the person landed or how they move and make comparisons between attempts. Augmented reality can also be used as it is developed further to place a map over a sidewalk, show doctors images as they operate, allow visitors of historical sites to see overlays of other content and even more things that we have yet to imagine.

My students are wonderful and learned from the experience. I also had fun seeing the new tools (that can double as toys) that Cisco is developing.