At EMBL-EBI we have recently upgraded the Audio Visual equipment in a large percentage of our meeting rooms. Here are a few things we considered during this process, whilst working with our AV integrator.

Meeting Room Standards

With rooms of many shapes and sizes at EMBL-EBI we decided to create some standards for our meeting spaces. This would allow our meeting rooms users to easily recognise the Audio Visual system in each room. The familiar room setups would also reduce any stressful troubleshooting at the beginning of meetings.

We settled on three standards, which will help for quick and easy installations of rooms in future projects.

Screens or Projectors?

We opted to install large format displays, over projectors. Projectors come in a lot cheaper than a display of an equivalent size. However, the displays perform a lot better in varying light conditions. They require less maintenance with costly bulb changes, and the staff don’t have to put up with noisy projector fans.

Retractable Cables

We installed retractor modules in each room, meaning the input cables are fixed to the tables. We no longer have to keep a spare supply of HDMI cables for when these go missing.

This solution has the potential to help to keep the tables tidy but in practice this rarely happens and the cables are left extended. We took care in locating the presentation positions as the maximum cable length is approximately 1m.

Apple Power Supplies

A common complaint among our Mac users was the usability of the power sockets.

Using Extron Cubby power modules, we raised the power sockets and angled them. This means an Apple power supply fits without hassle.

USB Conferencing Cameras

We have had great feedback on our portable Logitech Conference Connect cameras. Therefore, we decided to include the new Logitech MeetUp camera in three of our meeting rooms.

EMBL-EBI is a collaborative environment, which leads to a confusing number of conferencing platforms. This plug & play solution works with everything we’ve tried so far. It adds great functionality to a room for a reasonable price tag.

We also added the optional extension microphones to improve audio pickup.

Written by Sam Hester (samh@ebi.ac.uk)