Efficiency Estimates for Avatour Meetings

We’re happy to announce the release of the first version of Efficiency Estimates for Avatour meetings.

This feature provides reasonable estimates of CO₂ reduction as well as savings in time and money following from each Avatour meeting involving real-time 360 capture.

In this post we’ll outline the data behind the report and the assumptions made to provide these estimates.

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Currently we’re providing efficiency estimates only for a subset of Avatour meetings: the ones involving real-time 360° capture. These kinds of meetings deliver the highest value, and we decided this was the best place to start.

Note that this is our first version of this feature, and we’ll be continuing to refine it. In future releases we expect to enable customization of the assumptions currently built into the model.

Please let us know of any changes you’d like to see!

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Input Data

The input data for each report is the location information for each participant in an Avatour meeting with live capture. We derive this information either directly from GPS on the device, from browser-based location information, or—if these sources aren’t available—from the user’s IP address.

The 360 camera is presumed to be the location that each remote user would otherwise have to physically visit. We always have GPS data from this device, which is generally very accurate. We calculate the distance “as the crow flies” from each user to the camera, and use this information to calculate the various costs involved if that user had traveled to the location instead of using Avatour.

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Transport Assumptions

For each user we assume a mode of transport depending on the distance from the capture site: car, train, or commercial airplane. In the initial release, we make the following assumptions:

• Car: <150 km
• Train: <500 km
• Plane: > 500 km

We also presume that air travel under 10,000km one way is in coach, and travel above that distance is in business class, with impact both on cost and CO2 emissions.

These breakpoints will be configurable in a future release.

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Time Estimates

Time estimates are based on the typical average speed of car, train, and commercial jet planes, with additional overhead per trip. We estimate that air travel requires an additional 2.5 hours per flight of overhead from airport transfers, security, etc. We estimate only 30 min of overhead for train travel, and none for car travel.

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Direct Cost Estimates

In order to estimate the direct cost of each travel mode, we turned to a 2023 survey by CNET of travel costs to various destination. This gives us a rough estimate of the cost-per-mile for each mode of transport. There is certainly room for further specificity in this model; for example, intra-Europe flights can be considerably cheaper than this model.

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Indirect Cost Estimates

Any travel over a certain distance (500km for car travel, 1000km for trains, and 1500km for air) is presumed to include an overnight stay. We add an estimated indirect cost for overnight stays of USD $225, including $150 for hotel and $75 for food and incidentals. Future revisions will estimate per-diem differently depending on location, based on a standard such as that of the US State Department.

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CO₂ Emission Reduction

Based on the mode of transport presumed for each meeting attendee, we calculate the amount of CO₂ that would have been emitted by that travel using this 2019 data from the UK Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy. These are official numbers published by the UK government for use by UK companies in estimating their carbon footprint.

To view one of these reports, log in to Avatour.live and view the Analytics for any past meeting which had a live 360° capture and at least one remote participant.

Let us know what you think – email us at support@avatour.live.

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