Collaboration Hubs for the Home and Office | The Glass Age Today | Corning

Face-to-face time is great. But when you’ve got a team member in Beijing and another in Berlin (and your family is scattered across time zones, too) being around the same table is usually impossible.

Or is it?

“The idea of the collaboration hub was to facilitate the interchange of ideas and basically dissolve distances,” said Dr. Jeff Evenson, Corning senior vice president and chief strategy officer, while demonstrating the prototype Collaboration Hubs for the Home and Office at CES® 2017.

Work teams or families using a Collaboration Hub would activate a wireless interchange with their mobile devices to move content onto the hub, then view it on a brilliant, large-format display for better collaboration.

A touch-sensitive surface makes it possible to move the material quickly, even sketching and writing on it for better collaboration. And sharing can be instantaneous with others across town or around the world.

Technology-wise, it’s a tall order – but Corning’s advanced glass was up to the challenge.

The prototype at CES featured a tough, touch-sensitive outer surface of Corning® Gorilla® Glass, allowing for a highly responsive touch experience. The display itself was thin and bright, built on Corning® EAGLE XG® glass substrates.

And for real-world applications, Evenson noted, the fastest, most efficient network systems are over optical fiber, which Corning invented and has improved continuously over nearly five decades.

CES visitors were particularly excited about the notion that they could lay a tablet on the glass surface and instantly transfer information into the large display – just like the scenes in the “A Day Made of Glass” videos.

Besides traditional work and family scenarios, visitors envisioned the practical applications for group communication in education, law enforcement, and government.

Students, for example, could download homework on a tablet at school and work on it on the home collaboration surface.

“I have two kids in middle school. To have one device that would automatically bring homework on that interface - that’s exactly the type of thing they would love to do,” said Dr. Brad Bowden, Corning’s technology director for High Performance Displays.

The hub prototypes helped bring to life the idea of bridging distances through smart surfaces.

“Everyone has a smart device now, and that acts as a key to access this world – your world – through a specialty glass surface,” Bowden said.

“Those surfaces can be anywhere – in your home, or your office, or a public space. You have your own key to turn a surface into the world you want to collaborate with.”