We are living and working in a hybrid world with our colleagues and teams connecting, communicating and collaborating from more locations than ever before. The video above showcases one way to build a better bridge between in-person and remote meeting participants using flexible, agile design and modern technology.

We have a room at the BOS headquarters called “Collaborate”. This is the room where we hold large meetings, town halls, trainings and company events. Collaborate was designed to be flexible and multi-use as much of the furniture are on casters, nestable, lightweight and easy to rearrange; even the technology is moveable.

Before the pandemic, BOS configured this room to be a traditional stadium setup as most of the participants were in person with a speaker at the front of the room. In the Post-Pandemic workplace, we frequently have some of our team joining virtually either from home or from one of our other offices.

To make the meetings feel more natural, we changed the layout to be a rectangular shape and built a center unit with displays on all sides. This allows us to easily see remote participants without turning away from team members within the room, like how we would have had to do if the Zoom display was limited to the large screen at the front of the room. With our current set up, this is also great for enhanced visibility when someone is screen sharing.

The next challenge was to create an incredible experience for remote participants. For audio, we added wireless microphones as not only do they help with in-person acoustics in our large room with 35-foot ceilings, but they also ensure clean and clear audio for those joining via zoom or teams.

Video was our biggest challenge that we had to overcome as we needed to ensure that all remote participants could see those in the room in the best way possible. Traditionally, we would have mounted a camera at one end of the room, but that would not have been a great experience remotely.

Our solution came from a technology created by Owl Labs. These Meeting Owls create an immersive hybrid meeting experience using intelligent 360- degree cameras. Meeting Owls are now smart enough to communicate with each other and will focus in on whoever in the room is speaking. These cameras even stitch together three different speaker views into a single frame and leverage organic transitions and cuts for really nice experience as a remote viewer.

So, with all of these solutions in place (audio and video), all that was left to do was add in accessible power and we now have an incredibly effective hybrid meeting room!

Want to learn more about this technology and how you can create a great hybrid experience in your workplace? Come in and see for yourself at one of our inspiration centers, or contact BOS via email or phone. We have a great deal of insights, research, solutions and ideas for you.

Thanks for watching!