The term AV is a very general one, covering a lot of ground when it comes to the technology available today and the wide range of applications for which it is being used. End-users of audio-visual equipment – a category which itself goes from basic projection and sound reinforcement systems through beam-forming microphones and PTZ cameras, all the way up to virtual sets and LED video walls – are not a homogenous group, even in a specific area such as education, and have their own requirements that can be fairly broad or specific.
TECH GURUS
This end-user ‘tech guru’ roundtable reflects that breadth, but also the fact that those using, or implementing, the technologies have equally demanding needs with regard to service and support. And they also have to meet the expectations of final end-users, including students, lecturers, horticulturists and gallery curators. A good example is the University of the Arts in London (UAL), which has many colleges, each specialising in different subjects, including video production, journalism, gaming and fashion.
Because of this, explains IT project manager Annika Ranga, the UAL has a wide variety of AV needs and, consequently, technologies. “We have standard teaching spaces with lecterns, projectors, loudspeakers, screens and ceiling mics and a few have now been upgraded for hybrid teaching,” she says. “We also have quite fancy set-ups, including a virtual production stage for the Fashion Textiles and Technology Institute (FTTI). So there is a mixture of quite traditional equipment with very up-to-date technologies like virtual, online and hybrid.”
CUSTOMER DRIVEN
Each college within the UAL has an assigned AV team, which, says Ranga, will liaise with the teaching staff about technical requirements. Once that has been determined, Ranga and her colleague, Gary Keene, AV architect for Digital and Technology, will recommend systems integrators and specific technologies. “We will sit down with the AV support team or teaching staff and talk about what they need, whether it’s an interactive screen or a visualiser,” she says. “It is definitely customer driven because they bring us the ideas and we discuss options.”
Similarly, the AV department of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has to satisfy the varied needs of its core users within the membership organisation which has a mission to drive improvements in health and healthcare through advocacy, education and research. Like many institutions with in-house AV facilities, the RCP makes these available to corporate clients through lecture theatres in its 60-year old headquarters near London’s Regent Park and at the event spaces within The Spine building in Liverpool, which opened in May 2021.
BROAD SCOPE
“The context [for AV] is based around the organisation itself,” explains Ben Pain, head of audio-visual resources for RCP London Events. “We touch on pretty much all the verticals that would be expected for AV. As well as being a membership organisation we are a charity, an educational institution, a policy body and also have a corporate area for our business, in addition to being a venue and producing video and online web content.
“Across all that we support the commercial business as well as all the activities of the college. This includes live event production, hosting both internal council meetings and meetings for external companies, drinks receptions, spaces for teaching and collaborative learning and video production.”
Pain acknowledges this is a broad scope, particularly for an organisation of 400 people, but one that divides neatly into three categories: ensuring everything AV works on a day-to-day basis; planning ahead for the next two to three years to make sure everything is fit for purpose; and ‘horizon scanning’, which is looking at what is going on in the AV industry and considering what technologies will become more common and supportive of the activities of the RCP.
When it comes to his attitude towards AV technologies, Pain says he approaches them with a healthy mix of enthusiasm and scepticism. With this outlook in mind he tries to find real-life or practical applications. “Sometimes I feel [companies] bring products and systems to market without really having thought about what the best application will be. Quite a few manufacturers build something and then see how people want to use it.”
SHARED LEARNING
In terms of what Pain and the RCP AV team have focused on recently, particularly since building the Liverpool facility, network-based systems are now seen as a key component for the future. “We’ve done a lot of work for shared learning, understanding how we were using essentially the same infrastructure for both IT and AV content. The project in Liverpool was very successful for collaborative learning and we’re looking to retrofit some of it into our London building. Platforms like Q-SYS have made a big difference to how organisations like ours operate systems.”
The inevitable discussions about AI have also begun. “That’s partly because just about everything has an AI badge on it now, not always correctly. It is often conflated with automation but they’re not necessarily the same thing,” he adds.
The influence of modern technologies and AV systems, in particular, is being felt more keenly by almost all end-users, including those that might not have been considered as dependent on such technology. Like other galleries and museums, the Royal Academy of Arts did embrace the technology for audio guided tours but, as head of audio visual Benji Fox observes, it is now moving beyond such relatively basic AV techniques.
“A lot has changed in the nearly seven years I’ve been here,” he says. “When I joined – and, of course, pre-Covid – exhibitions relied on headphones, so there wasn’t audio spill. Since then we have had shows that have challenged that concept. One thing I’ve tried to promote is that sound and artworks collectively are compositions. Sometimes we try to have sound blocks, but a factor is that this is a Grade 2 listed building and sometimes it can be difficult to control sound.”
IMMERSIVE AUDIO
Despite this inherent challenge, a current exhibit at the RA relies on an immersive audio system, plus projected images, and shows, as Fox says, that the in-house AV department now covers a broad spectrum of work and projects, not just installation. He explains that discussions began in February on how to present the retrospective show of work by artist Michael Craig-Martin, with Fox creating the soundtrack for one section in his own studio.
PMC Ci series loudspeakers have been located at various points in the gallery, making for a cinematic soundscape to accompany the images. “This is the largest scale AV installation we’ve ever had, to my knowledge,” says Fox. “It is dedicated to one work and takes up an entire gallery. We’ve also never projected 360-degrees on the gallery walls before and certainly never had such an ambitious immersive sound experience.”
Fox says curators at the RA are now asking what is possible using modern visual and audio equipment. While LED walls often come up in discussions, as in the case of the Craig-Martin show, Fox’s first question is whether they would be cost-effective. In this instance it was decided they were not and projection was considered instead. The AV team worked with Epson on the installation, using its 20K/native 4K model for floor to ceiling projections. Other artists are now requesting LED walls and if these are used they are hired rather in.
Wolfson Lecture Theatre provides advanced AV systems
Even less obvious than the use of AV technology at the Royal Academy is the role it might play at that epitome of the natural world, the Eden Project. On the face of it, as chief experience development officer Blair Parkin says, the plants and exhibits “do all our talking for us”. But then, he reflects that, during the course of the year, it does actually use a surprising amount of AV technology.
BUSINESS VENUE
“As a business, behind the scenes, we have our meeting rooms and we’ve just switched from Zoom to Teams, so we’ve got new touch panels and screens throughout the organisation for all the business collaboration we do,” he says. “We are also used as a business and event venue all the time, anything from weddings to corporate events to major international political and business conferences such as Anthropy, which came out when we hosted the G7.”
He continues: “So we’re stopping thinking of ourselves as just a humble eco attraction with our rainforest and mediterranean biomes, but also as a venue, staging shows like the summer concert sessions. For those we deploy a mixture of house technology – we have a big Meyer concert sound system – and either whatever the act brings, or anything we hire in from local rental companies.”
While this traditional AV gear will continue to play a key role in the events staged at the Eden Project, more recent and merging technologies are now being considered to see what they can offer. “Last year we had a major adventure into AR to interpret our rainforest using 5G devices, working with telcos and technology providers,” Parkin explains. “From an Eden perspective, one of the things we don’t want technology to do is distract from the bigger story, but add to it. When you’ve got the largest indoor living rainforest in the world you don’t want everybody looking down at their phones, you want people walking up into the canopy, understanding biodiversity and how the rainforest system works and how humans are dependent on it.”
EMERGING TECHNOLOGY
Most of those on the end-user roundtable were involved in the general areas of current and emerging AV technology. The exception is Alex Counsell, technical director of CCIXR (Centre for Creative and Immersive eXtended Realities) at the University of Portsmouth, who is focused on what he calls cutting-edge technologies, with studios for motion capture, volumetric video, virtual production and photogrammetry. “I’m not involved with AV for the whole university,” he explains, “I look at non-traditional uses and innovative ways to allow connectivity and flexibility between our studios within the centre and also enable remote links for researchers and clients.”
CCIXR, which opened in 2022, is based on a centre-wide Crestron DN-NVX networking system that connects the different studios and allows content shown anywhere. “We can send any desktop screen from our motion capture studio to any meeting room or to a free-standing monitor that is plugged into a NVX port and also stream any of that remotely,” Counsell outlines. “There is also a virtual production stage for teaching and broadcast. We’re able to take feeds from any of our studios and use that as picture-in-picture on a virtual broadcast stage.”
TENDER GUIDELINES
As a public sector organisation, the University of Portsmouth and, by extension, the CCIXR, work on stringent tender guidelines. “Every three years the wider university puts out a tender to an installation company and they will be awarded a contract to be the university’s supplier for the next three years,” he says. “My priority was to ensure the supplier could specify and provide what I required, as well as the traditional AV equipment, which, as an approved Crestron installer, they were able to do.”
The headquarters of the Royal College of Physicians, London
On a service and support level, Counsell expects a quick response if there are any problems. “If something goes wrong I need it fixed, especially as we’re dealing with the teaching staff and our clients,” he continues. “Teaching cannot be disrupted because the system is not working. That’s a critical incident as far as we’re concerned. And also with our clients, if the connectivity isn’t there to give them what they require then it should be about speed and response and that is included in the tender award, with the best effort and reaction time. We are also able to troubleshoot with our internal AV team, but if anything is outside their remit we will go back to the original supplier.”
EDUCATION APPROACH
Annika Ranga at UAL confirms the higher education approach of tendering, explaining that the university works with two systems integrators, GVAV and proAV. “We have either a three- or five-year agreement with them for our teaching spaces and colleges,” she explains. “The reason we use two integrators is something we learned from Covid, which is not to rely on one company. It’s also good for keeping them competitive in terms of cost and work. Summer is our busy time for installations, so I tend to split the works because I know one company cannot do everything.”
The RCP has an operational team of 19 over its two sites, which Ben Pain says monitors the technology and maintenance on an in-house basis. But they also work with external AV companies if they need installations or upgrades.
He says: “What we expect from those suppliers is competence and integrity. Part of my job is to be a gatekeeper [on behalf of the college] because I can talk to integrators in a way that they know what I’m asking for. It’s a lot easier for me to engage with them and say ‘this is what I want’, or ‘that sounds expensive’, or ‘more practical’. I’m able to engage with quite a few manufacturers as well, which helps sometimes with these conversations.”
OUTSIDE SUPPLIERS
The Eden Project is similarly finding itself talking to more outside suppliers and consultancies, particularly as it embraces more sophisticated technology. “We’ve brought in extra consultants for experience design, to help with large venue-based technology,” Blair Parkin explains. “We’re working with Charcoalblue as our experienced engineering consultant and through them we are looking at a lot of media technologies. We’re also working with Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) on new media, virtual/augmented reality and 5G real-time streaming, especially for our planned new sites at Morecambe Bay and Dundee.”
As with the other institutions on the roundtable, the Royal Academy has been reliant on what Benji Fox calls outside expertise and suppliers, but this is changing.
“What my team is working towards is to cost savings by bringing installations more in house,” he explains. “That will include specifying equipment and the installation work itself. We do rely on external support for that, but it’s a real area of transition and change for us. The way this department is situated within the Academy is we are a service provider and that can be supplying hybrid support that the IT teams aren’t capable of providing right up to exhibitions. Our ambition is to show off a gold standard of installation at this level.”
Although all our roundtable contributors are working in separate fields with different demands placed on them and their equipment, each one is determined to make the most of AV technologies to achieve the best results.
