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Vivitek NovoPros bring lectures to life at University College London

University College London (UCL) has selected Vivitek’s NovoPro wireless collaboration tool to enhance lectures and help bring students’ work and projects to life.

UCL is a leading multidisciplinary university and now the second largest physical university in the UK, home to 38,000 students and 12,000 staff.

Paul Burt, spaces & AV service owner, information services division, UCL, who is responsible for the technical facilities in 700 teaching spaces across the institution, explained: “We had a requirement for a wireless presentation solution that was simple to use but could easily scale to an enterprise-grade level. I was aware that there were some complex solutions already available on the market, but they were very expensive. I then came across the NovoPro on Vivitek’s booth at ISE 2016.”

The first project the NovoPro solutions were used for was the university’s new business school, located on the 38th floor of the One Canada Square tower in Canary Wharf.

The next project was even more ambitious, with a subsequent 15 NovoPros installed in teaching spaces at the Bartlett School of Architecture on Gordon Street. In that application, multiple connections to the NovoPros are being used to enable architecture students to connect up to display and discuss their work with other students and their lecturers. This new, interactive and collaborative method for sharing work and ideas replaces cabled display connections and to some extent, the paper-based display of designs and concepts.

With NovoPro as the hub, contributing digital content onto the projection screen is fast and the additional features such as on screen annotation and capture open up a vast array of creative possibilities in any meeting. Participants can instantly connect their device via a WiFi connection to NovoPro and start sharing immediately once the meeting host assigns them one of the four (split screen) projection connections.

Given the value that NovoPro adds to the learning experience, it is often in use from 9am to 10pm at UCL, with no failed units or problems reported. “It does everything we need it to, and it’s cost effective,” said Burt. “We also like the fact that given this is a reasonably new market that’s evolving quite quickly, the attractive price point of the NovoPro means we’re not financially committed to one product route, which gives us more flexibility over our future AV needs and how we can accommodate them.” Burt estimates that circa 1,000 students are using the current NovoPro units, which are linked into the University’s EduRoam WiFi network.

“One of the benefits of NovoPro is that it is always a challenge to maintain working HDMI leads in a teaching space,” added Burt. “Not relying on the HDMI leads also prevents trip risk incidents from occurring and there’s no need to swap HDMI cables between students’ devices.”

www.vivitek.eu