The Enterprise Hub’s teaching spaces consist of one large 120-seater teaching room, which can be divided into four smaller 30-seater rooms. Each of the four rooms contains an NEC 86-inch interactive screen, Laptops and Mersive Solstice Pods as sources, Crestron NVX signal routing, Revolabs microphones for speech reinforcement, and a Slimline Active Learning Enclosure (originally developed by the University of the Arts London and Top-Tec).
The Top-Tec Learning Console- which functions as a lectern- is held in an enclosure on the wall. This is the first time that these frames have been used at the University; they were chosen to help streamline the room design and save space. The interesting and unique design aspects reflect the university’s use of an interior designer.
These new generation teaching rooms are part of the general teaching room stock so can be used by the whole academic community. University technical staff delivered 100+ training sessions to show users how to best utilise the technology available.
The Enterprise Hub’s meeting rooms were designed to be fully connected an implemented as Microsoft Teams Meeting Rooms (MTR’s) utilising Crestron Flex systems. The meeting rooms (four small meeting rooms; two medium meeting rooms; two large meeting rooms) are fully optimized for in person and hybrid meetings.
The Enterprise Hub’s function room- used for presentations and events- was installed with an NEC projector, which has given the room a more professional appearance. There is a possibility that this space will later be upgraded with a more impressive LED wall.
As well as within individual rooms and spaces, the use of AV to improve communications throughout the building can also be seen in the installation of signage units in the entrance lobby (a pair of NEC 98-inch screens in portrait, driven from TriplePlay signage units), and on the ground floor (mosaic videowall of five NEC 55-inch LCDs driven from TriplePlay signage units and Datapath FX4 videowall controllers). A background audio system was also installed in multiple zones throughout the collaboration hub.
Finally, since AV is used throughout the Enterprise Hub, it was important to ensure that the building’s AV systems are centrally managed. Therefore, a central rack was placed on the ground floor, which houses a shared control processor, a Q-SYS Core, and all the audio power amplifiers. The amplifiers were a challenge since they required detailed calculations for the speaker cable specification. This meant that the correct gauge of speaker cable needed to be calculated, considering the power delivery, the load imposed by the speakers, and the cable length of those speakers. In order to do this, the Reflex design team developed an excel solution to calculate these values. This tool was used to help the M&E contractor pull the correct cable length to each position, and to do the entire job with only two different cable gauges. This tool is still used as a valuable estimating tool to help put together quotations for future works.
