California’s Long Beach City College (LBCC) recently opened a new eSports facility on its Liberal Arts Campus that relies on Extron AV control technology and NAV Pro AV over IP for switching and distribution of gaming content.
The gaming floor seats 47 players at Alienware gaming stations. Coaches monitor and advise players from five mobile stations that plug into the network at Extron connection boxes at the end of each team table. A shoutcaster booth with twin 65in flat panel displays seats a production and announcer staff of two.
Designed and built by California firms HPI Architecture, P2S Engineering, and EKC Enterprises, with assistance from Extron, and under supervision of the LBCC Multimedia Technologies staff, the facility provides LBCC’s championship-winning eSports teams with a top-flight home field that replaces the gaming space they previously borrowed at a nearby high school.
Chris Greenwood, project manager, educational & multimedia technologies at Long Beach City College, said: “Extron’s AV control system design for the eSports facility met our requirement to keep things intuitive for users.
“The TouchLink Pro touchpanel GUIs show clickable room maps of gaming stations and video displays, which makes assigning gaming stations to teams, creating competition matchups, and arranging multiple video windows on room displays very natural for users while the control system and the NAV Pro AV over IP network handle switching and transmission behind the scenes.”
Extron says the large number of AV endpoints, with possibly more to come over time, made NAV Pro AV over IP a logical choice. To add more endpoints the college can connect more encoders and decoders to the network.
NAV’s ultra-low latency transmission over 1 Gbps Ethernet is designed to provide a player edge in speed during competitions where fast player reactions are a must. NAV encoders connect gaming PCs, PTZ cameras, and other AV content sources to the network. NAV scaling decoders provide the AV content from the network to the many displays around the facility in 4K clarity, as well as streaming to internet gaming platforms like Twitch or YouTube via OBS Studio.
MGP 641 xi multi-window processors allow the production team to create split screen presentations of up to eight source windows on any display. It is designed to keep audiences gripped by the action as the games unfold.
