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An Interview With Vegard Hammer, Chief Technology Officer of Huddly

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Interview with Huddly

This is an interview with Vegard Hammer, chief technology officer of Huddly, as written by Steph Beckett. It has been edited for clarity.

Tell me a little bit about Huddly’s background as a company.

Huddly was founded on the vision and the strategy of making the collaboration tools more available for more people and especially the knowledge workers. We came from a history and a background of Tandberg and Cisco and the traditional telepresence videoconferencing industry. That industry was kind of stuck in serving the high-end meeting rooms and the boardroom. We saw that there was an opportunity to make these tools available to knowledge workers, which is essentially what Huddly is. It’s a company of knowledge workers. It’s a company of engineers and designers and salespeople who want to create something together in teams. We found that the tools that we really needed to be able to create in teams were only available to the high-end meeting rooms and the boardrooms, whilst the tools were as valuable — if not more valuable — to the knowledge workers in the huddle rooms. And that’s where the name comes from. Huddly … set off wanting to solve that problem, and we solved that problem with our first camera, the Huddly GO, which was this small form-factor camera …

Your product lineup has since expanded, I understand.

We became the default camera for the Google Meet kits, and we were later adopted by Crestron as the standard camera for the Crestron kits. And people started to pick up this camera because it has an elegant design. … Then, we evolved the goal. We put out the next generation of GO, which we called the IQ. With the name, we were talking about the fact that this was an intelligent camera.

We saw that the hardware platform we created was also an excellent hardware platform to enable content share on whiteboards. So, we created a whiteboarding product called Canvas, which has been very successful, especially in remote learning scenarios.

Then, we wanted to expand our portfolio and think bigger. … Could we create a camera with no moving parts to serve those (larger) meeting rooms as well? So we were experimenting a lot with the different design of optics and different choices of sensors. We came out with the L1, which is a networks-based camera for the large meeting rooms, following the strategy of the IQ with no moving parts — a camera that at any given time may have a view of the whole room but with the ability to zoom in on the participants in a meeting room, around the meeting table without losing quality.

We’ve evolved that into the next product we’re excited about, that’s called the S1, which is, again, the next evolvement for small and medium-sized meeting rooms with clever technology we’re putting into that.

It seems like after developing the L1, the S1 is going back to small and medium meeting rooms, which is what Huddly started with. Tell me more about why you shifted to developing a product for small and medium rooms again. 

I think we’re ever evolving our experiences in the meeting room … we really want to create experiences that are as engaging as possible. We spent a lot of time doing user research on how people behave in meeting rooms and — as a far-end participant — what’s the most engaging experience. It didn’t take a long time until we realized that this is being done all the time for talk shows for entertainment consumption. So, we went to professionals from the TV industry and we hired them to teach us how to create engaging experiences in a conversation. They taught us about reaction shots — how it’s fine to have the focus on whoever’s talking or whoever’s carrying the narrative, but while you’re doing that, how it’s good to also take these pauses and reaction shots of other people who are in the meeting. So, we decided not to do a traditional speaker track … but rather evolve an experience that takes care of everyone in a meeting room and provides an engaging experience to the far end.

huddly s1 product image

The Huddly S1.

Meetings are viewed much differently than they were pre-pandemic. Is the S1 a product of that shift? 

Videoconferencing has been around for 25 years or so. And I’ve been around for 20 of those years in the industry. And the thing that hasn’t changed is camera perspective. You have a camera on your display — either above it or below it. No company’s tried to see how we can change that experience to make it more engaging. … That’s the most exciting thing about the products we’re bringing out now. We’re mixing it up and we’re taking away that divider between entertainment and unified collaboration or videoconferencing and we’re saying, “hey, there’s things we can learn.” People have been doing this for years that have been doing it manually with camera people and everything. But the technology is available for us to automate this and make it more interesting.

I wanted to bring up the quote your CEO, Alexander Woxen, gave when the S1 was released. He said, “Like everything we do, S1 pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in order to create an equitable and inclusive experience for all.” How can fusing the UCC and entertainment industries create a more equitable meeting experience? 

Understanding what “equitable” means is sometimes difficult because when you have a one-to-one, then you have good equity because there are just two participants to consider in that situation. If you have an all-hands meeting (which I’m sure a lot of people have during the pandemic), then you get 67 people on a call. That just reduces equity. If you try to get everyone displayed on a screen at any given time, then everyone is just small tiles and you lose touch with everyone instead of being engaged in the topic for discussion.

With this technology, rather than trying to display as many people as possible, we’re using artificial intelligence to follow the conversation and follow the relevant people who are part of that conversation … we’ll be able to adapt from three people to 20 people and up to 70 people and stay where the action is.

AV and AI are converging a lot more than they used to — particularly as the pandemic deems remote learning and remote meetings necessary. Will this trend continue? 

It’s interesting. I truly believe that there is going to be a transition in the market to more network devices — what you’ll see on the new Huddly products (the L1 and S1) is that these are network products. That extends the traditional AV integration points to a place where these are now no longer just devices that output an audio signal or a video signal. These are starting to be intelligent devices that can intelligently communicate to other things in the meeting room. We’ll start to see intelligent microphones and intelligent speakers, they will intelligently communicate with our intelligent cameras on a network for the meeting room. You’ll see that there will be more cameras that will connect to each other and be able to collaborate to create new meeting room experiences.

What do you think the future of work looks like in the next year or few years? How can products like the Huddly S1 be part of that? 

That’s a great question. One thing that has been part of Huddly’s DNA from the beginning has been to shape our products with software. We’re not requesting people to replace their hardware or send someone to the meeting room to replace cameras every time there’s a new trend that’s happening. … We’re already seeing how a lot of companies are realizing that this industry moves too fast to keep up with — if your strategy is to shape your product with hardware.

We’re always providing software upgrades, which provides new experiences for the IQ. Now we’re coming out with a new experience called “Gallery View,” which provides even better equity in the small-to-medium-sized meeting rooms. This is a product that’s been in the market for two-and-a-half years now. So there’s a large return on investment when investing in Huddly equipment because we are essentially a software company and an artificial intelligence company. We just happen to sell cameras.

For more information on Huddly’s product lineup, including the S1, visit its website here.

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