Open Collaboration Space

Children's Hospital Nebraska reached out about building out their new collaboration space's. They had several areas that needed flexible use. They needed capabilities with touch screens, zoom rooms, and wanted to know what our recommendation would be. Right now is a great time to be looking for solutions for spaces like this as the technology is really advanced.

When picking a solution we like to know how the space will be used and who will be using it as much as possible. This helps us to narrow the selection of technology that should be used in the space and bring focus to the design. The areas in this new center needed to be used by a large variety of people with a large variety of use cases and usually a complete lack of training. With this in mind we choose a solution using a common interface, zoom rooms. Zoom as a platform provides a common interface that most in the working world are familiar with. Children's Nebraska already had Zoom licensing and was using Zoom for the organization so this provided another natural point of tie in. Zoom rooms are flexible and allow collaboration, easy device sharing, and white board functionality in spaces.

With a common platform picked, we needed to provide actual hardware for the space. The space as a whole had multiple areas for displays including a front entryway, a white board wall, and 4 different meeting areas. Each of the different meeting areas needed to be able to have Zoom meetings showing multiple participants, even audio coverage, and work with Zoom rooms. For a hardware platform we chose DTEN for the majority of the spaces. DTEN manufactures top end multi-camera displays making large groups feel more interactive on calls. One of the best functions of these displays is the "Multi Stream" camera outputs. DTEN takes a large 4k image from multiple cameras and then divides them up based on motion and sound. These divisions use zooms smart gallery feature to show full screen views of each persons face for the call. Zoom participants on the other end see a full gallery of faces as well as a wide view of the room for context. This allows for the best possible connection of what is going on in a room remotely for all participants.

In the large huddle room we used DTEN's D7x dual, this unit has 2 large displays with a total of 5 cameras. We located the display in this room a little lower than you would normally see but it allows for eye-line with cameras and displays to be nearly horizontal. The combination of cameras at eye-line allows a roomful of people to all be represented clearly and separately. This provides an immeasurable amount of information to people in the meeting such as small facial cues and expressions that help teams to function, solve problems, and work together in a more natural way.

Other spaces used smaller versions of the same display type, but with less cameras for less breakups, and one mini team collaboration desk with a pop up Zoom display. All areas included DTEN MATE devices, a small wireless rechargeable touch screen pad providing easy meeting management even if you aren't presenting from the front of the room. Every display offers quick sharing from almost any device using the Zoom app and a simple on screen code. In the front entryway and non touch screen areas we used an even simpler setup, a standard professional grade tv with a simple pc mounted behind it. We call these signage/sharing displays. Zoom provides a free license for signage sharing only that makes these simple setups able to show content scheduled throughout the day, and also allow sharing. A simple rotating code displays above the image and allows someone to walkup and share content with any device.

These are simple devices, and the installation is not a complex one. Lambda AV always works to provide the correct technology for the space even if its simple because we want the technology that is going to add to the experience, but disappear when it comes to complication and use. We look forward to seeing how this space comes to life in the coming months!