BEST PRACTICE
Install flexible ways to control in-room lighting on demand, such as blinds or curtains.
Use “neutral white” LED lighting (4000 to 5000 Kelvin).
How to Equip a Video Meeting Room
The following factors play a role when equipping and setting up a meeting room for video conferencing
Room Acoustics
The first and perhaps most important aspect to consider is acoustics. Meeting rooms are built to enable meaningful dialogue, which is why it’s critical to ensure that their acoustic properties facilitate this.
BEST PRACTICE
Floor: Use floor carpeting or other soft materials that are good at absorbing sound and dampen furniture noises.
Ceiling: Select special acoustic tiles or hanging panels for the ceiling in order to reduce room reverberance.
Walls: Consider placing acoustic absorption on the walls. Ideally, at least two adjacent walls should have panels made of an acoustic absorbent material.
WHAT TO AVOID
Surfaces that reflect sound, which may compromise audio quality. This means not using hard materials like stone, glass, metal, and so on.
Hardwood flooring or tiles, for the same reason.
Lighting
Meeting spaces — especially ones built for video calls will also need to consider the lighting sources and placement
Room colors
While vividly colorful rooms may be great from a design perspective, they risk being a source of distraction and distortion for video calls
Furniture
Furniture plays an important role in facilitating conversations and ensuring that remote attendees can interact with in-room participants.
Other Considerations
Here are a few general guidelines to designing an effective video meeting space
Camera
The conference room camera must be able to capture everyone in the room. Some considerations
Keep the camera at participants’ eye level, pointed at the center of the room. Place it right above or below the screen, if possible.
If the camera must be placed above or below eye level, pick a camera that can be adjusted for pan, tilt, and viewing angle.
When placing the camera / video bar under the screen, the ideal placement is 115–120 centimeters (45–47 inches) from the floor to the camera lens.
When placing the camera / video bar above the screen, keep it below 180 centimeters (71 inches) from the floor to avoid the bird’s-eye view.
Select a camera with the right field of view (FOV) that can capture the entire room and its participants.
Simplify the setup process with a compact, all-in-one conference camera with built-in speakers, like EPOS EXPAND Vision 5.
Display
Picking the right screen and positioning it appropriately is critical to ensuring effective remote meetings
Number of displays: If possible, it will be an advantage to set up two separate screens — one for shared content and one for the video feed from remote attendees. For focus rooms and smaller meeting rooms, a single display is usually sufficient.
Display size: This depends largely on the size of the room. As a rule of thumb, the furthest seated participant should be easily able to see fine details like text. The recommended viewing distance is between one and four times the diagonal length of the monitor.
Display placement: Mount the monitor around the eye level of seated participants. This is typically between 116-127 centimeters (46–50 inches) from the floor but will largely depend on the camera placement.
Display settings: Ensure the lowest possible latency to facilitate real-time communication (if there’s a “Game” or “PC” mode on the monitor, enable it). Screen resolution, brightness, contrast, and color saturation should be set to provide the most natural appearance of remote attendees.
Audio (Speakers and Microphones)
Audio is probably the most important and critical factor in video conferencing. If the audio quality is poor attendees will lose concentration and get fatigued.
Make sure in-room microphones are capable of picking up sound from every seated participant.
Chose voice triggered beamforming microphone systems to get the best possible ambient noise rejection.
In larger meeting rooms best practices are to use center-of-table microphone systems e.g., speakerphones and adding expansion mics in case of very long tables.
Make sure microphones can be easily muted from most in-room locations, when needed
Compute unit
Video meetings need a compute unit to run the necessary software and process all input/output from video/audio sources. There are several options
Video bar
All-in-one video bars like the EPOS EXPAND Vision 5 come with a built-in compute unit, as well as microphones and speakers. They are the most complete option right out of the box and are easy to set up and use.
Dedicated compute device
This is where a compute unit is permanently left in the meeting room and pre-connected to all of the video and audio equipment. The best location for this is near or behind the screen. Participants must connect to this compute unit in order to join remote video meetings.
Bring-your-own-device (BYOD)
This takes the form of a plug-and-play conferencing setup that uses a professional camera like EPOS EXPAND Vision 1M. Users can bring and connect their own laptops via e.g. a USB cable. In this case, the user’s laptop also serves as the compute unit that runs any necessary conferencing software.
Hub / Dock
Some BYOD conference rooms rely on a special hub or dock that serves as the central connection point for the video camera, speakerphone, monitors, laptops, and so on. Here are the differences
Dock
A dock—or “docking station”—is a workstation that users can click their laptop into. (Some cable converters that rely on mains power are also called “docks.”) Docks are typically larger than hubs, provide power to other plugged in appliances, and have a higher number of ports or cable converters.
Hub
A hub is more simple and serves mainly to expand the number of available USB ports on a connected laptop. Hubs can support a variety of USB ports which differ in terms of version (USB 2.0 vs. USB 3.0) or in terms of connection type (USB-A vs. USB-C). Some hubs also come equipped with an Ethernet port to support wired Internet connectivity.
Touch Controller
Meeting room controllers let users easily start their meetings and interact with in-progress meetings by e.g. sharing content on the screen
Scheduling Panel
These offer a quick and convenient way for employees to schedule meetings, book rooms, and see a room’s availability status
Cable Management
Smart cable management is an essential part of an enterprise-grade meeting room. It helps prevent cables from tangling and getting in the way, which can create distractions and negatively affect meeting participation. Here’s how to facilitate cable retention