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High tech for biotech: Research facility's high-end meeting center for video and audio conferencing

Communications News, June, 2004 by Steve Fox

After the trustees of the Presbyterian Health Foundation of Oklahoma City decided to sell their hospital to HCA in 1985, their next goal was to build a world-class research facility that would establish Oklahoma City as a major center for biomedical research and development. With a new a facility that houses some of the most renowned names in medical research, the decision was made to build a top-notch conference center that would enable both the tenants and other regional businesses to meet and conduct state-of-the-art, interactive audio and videoconferencing, along with medical visualization and simulation capabilities.

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The project required the design of a large, tiered conference room and a smaller boardroom that would accommodate up to 20 people. In addition, a central equipment room was designed to accommodate all the equipment, with duplicate controls for both rooms.

The boardroom uses an intelligent, interactive, cube wall display that uses digital signal processing technology. Both rooms offer multiple inputs, including a Windows NT-based, LAN-connected computer workstation, plus up to six RGB computer/video sources and nine composite video sources. The Windows desktop is displayed over all of the screens simultaneously, and both video and RGB can appear on the screens at the same time. Both the NT desktop and the RGB sources are controlled by a single wireless mouse, and four computer-video interfaces are available for visiting laptops.

Media playback is provided from S-VHS recorders, CDs, DVD players, two AM/FM/TV tuners and a combination CD/cassette recorder. The room also is outfitted with five high-quality, remote-controllable cameras with motorized pan-and-tilt heads. Most important was the need for the cameras and microphones to be voice activated.

The tiered conference room supports meetings of up to 50 people and utilizes a pair of side-by-side rear projection screens. Each projection system consists of a wide-angle diffusion, 115" acrylic, in-wall projection screen and a 4000 ANSI lumens LCD projector. During videoconferencing, one screen displays the incoming picture while the other has the local image.

CONFERENCE ROOM SETUP

"Rear projection was chosen to maximize space and was more cost-effective than video cubes," says Pat Padovan, director of engineering for The Sextant Group, the project's technology consulting firm.

This room also has the automatic cameras and microphones. In both rooms, there are separate and discrete audio systems, one for audio playback and one for speech reinforcement. In addition, each of the rooms has conference table "pop-ups" with small, personal voice-lift loudspeakers.

The videoconference systems were designed to handle both IP and ISDN, although they are using primarily IP, due to lower transmission costs. The facility happened to be built in the same building as OneNet, a videoconferencing broker, so if another transmission protocol is needed, OneNet can feed high-bandwidth access along with Vyvx, satellite up-link, Gigapop and Internet II.

The Sextant Group had a number of important issues to deal with in determining which equipment to choose. "We had to figure out the geometry, viewable angles and camera locations for both rooms, and determine which audio system would fill the rooms' requirements," says Padovan.

"We also needed to find a system that would work as automatically as possible using voice activation," adds Dave Coopey, Sextant's project consultant.

The team chose audio-conferencing equipment and cameras manufactured by ClearOne. The tiered room system uses six ClearOne XAP 800s, which are eight-channel, AEC microphone mixers/audio management and distribution systems, and an XAP 400 four-channel system with a built-in telephone hybrid and amplifier. These systems support 52 microphones and bandit all of the audio mixing, routing and control functions.

In addition, the XAPs support 38 zones of mix-minus speech, which can be individually delayed for correct alignment of local and reinforced speech signals. Both rooms are equipped with five ClearOne PTZ 100 remote-control cameras. Each room also has a Hitachi HVD30 fixed camera.

All cameras and microphones are voice activated, with the programming done on Crestron TSP-6000 controllers. "Because of the voice activation, the Crestron is programmed to cut to a wide shot after each close-up while the camera finds the next speaker to focus on," says Coupe. All the microphones are AKG CK80 cardiod mics with AKG GN-15 goosenecks. The wireless mics are Lectrosonic 700-encrypted digital systems. The videoconferencing systems are Polycom VS4000 codecs with PR1 T-1 interface.

In the tiered room, the LCD projectors are Sharp XG-V10XU LCD video projectors and the boardroom video wall cubes are Synelec LMR 50" cubes. Other products include floor boxes from FSR, racks from Mid America and Extron interfaces. The conference center is run by 10 to 15 PCs situated in the individual rooms and the central control room, controlling everything from the video walls to the conferencing equipment to the touch screens. Everything is connected by R5-232, including TV tuners, radio tuners, cameras, mixers, DVDs and S-VHS recorders.

Technology Industry

High tech for biotech: Research facility's high-end meeting center for video and audio conferencing

Communications News, June, 2004 by Steve Fox

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