Technology Products in the Workplace
Room booking Systems
Room booking systems can save time, reduce frustration, and monitor meeting space usage for planning purposes. It’s certainly worth exploring the extent to which such technology is practical for your workspace.
Digital Signage in the workplace
Digital signage in the workplace can achieve a great deal for such a modest outlay. This is because the hard part, the network to carry it, is already in place. All you need to complete the picture are the displays themselves and the means to control their content. With LCD displays now very inexpensive, more corporations and institutions than ever before are discovering how useful a video network can be for them.
There are, in fact, several aspects for which a digital video network can prove its worth. Here are a few that quickly come to mind.
Having your own video network within your workplace enables you to communicate and reinforce corporate values to your workforce and your workplace visitors at the same time.
It’s also a great way to nurture a sense of community within your workplace, the kind of bond that helps enormously with staff retention and in attracting them in the first place. Such screens can publicise upcoming community events or display footage of events that have already happened.
Community is one of several wellness elements that digital signage can help you address. Fundamental wellness aspects like air quality, water quality, and circadian lighting can be explained to employees and visitors alike, along with the steps you have taken on their behalf to address such issues. You can also display any relevant metrics.
Nutrition and Movement are other wellness elements that digital signage can help you address. Signage can encourage both.
Digital display can also help you address Mind, arguably one of the most difficult wellness elements to tackle, through the provision of digital art or daily puzzles.
All in all, digital signage can provide you with a powerful means of communication with employees and visitors alike. You can tell your corporate story, reinforce your corporate values or simply make your workplace a better place to be.
Mobile Phone Coverage Boost
Mobile is often the preferred number to call these days, so any unsatisfactory mobile reception experience in your workplace will adversely impact productivity.
Mobile reception problems in high rise buildings are expected to increase significantly in the near future. You may be experiencing such problems already. The good news is that you can do something about it straight away with a carrier agnostic system on offer that fixes the problem economically at a tenancy level.
Collaboration Tables
This is especially true for many planning or architectural collaborations. Touch tables and downward projection both have their merits as a means of tabletop collaboration. The Ci Group can help you with either.
Digital Lockers
As more workplaces shift to a functional needs base rather than assign individual desks and offices, individual belongings and materials become in need of a new home. The digital locker is the most efficient form for providing such a home because it is more easily managed.
Rather than require a key, access can be through passcode entry or digital recognition. This solves both the inevitable lost key problem and the time and effort necessary to deal with it.
Lockers can be tailored to suit your needs and manufactured in whatever finish is necessary to complement your interior design. Done right, they enable your workplace to more readily adapt to change.
Switchable Glass
Switchable glass is proven technology that makes it easy to combine the need for privacy with the desire for open transparent spaces that are less claustrophobic. Switchable glass technology enables glass to be transparent one moment and opaque the next at the flick of switch. It’s faster than curtaining, easier to clean, and not prone to mechanical failure.
Screen Content Security Glass
Screen content security glass is glass treated with a special film transparent to the naked eye that blocks the wavelength at which screen content is viewed. This remarkable product makes any screens viewed through the glass appear totally black, thus effectively rendering the screen content invisible to anyone outside the room.
Biophilic Soundscaping
Most people in a modern building today regularly work in open plan and encounter productivity problems through distraction from nearby voices. Biophilic soundscaping successfully deals with this issue, and the Ci Group has become Australia’s leading practitioner of the technique. Rather than use white or pink noise to mask unwanted voice distraction, sound from nature is used instead, – along with visual confirmation. This delivers a better outcome.
Acoustic Treatment
The modern workplace has many acoustically reflective surfaces and realistically always will. Who doesn’t like floor to ceiling glass or shiny clean meeting tables? Exposed brick walls, solid plaster ceilings, concrete floors or polished floorboards are features highly unlikely to go out of style anytime soon. Such common design elements come at a price, however. Reflective surfaces directly opposite each other invariably create audio problems. Such opposing situations might be wall to wall, ceiling to floor or ceiling to table. Unless something is done about such matters, meetings in such spaces are less pleasant to the ear and often less productive as a result. The Ci Group is able to address the situation with a broad range of suitable acoustic treatments, both affixed and suspended that deal with this issue. You can immediately hear the difference.
Microphones & Sound Processing
The ability to be heard is fundamental to two-way communication. As meeting rooms get larger, the degree of difficulty increases for both audio capture and playback. Microphones get further away from people’s mouths and speakers in built to monitors get further away from people’s ears.
Technology comes to the rescue in a variety of ways. Microphones, for example, come in different forms, from proximity models located in the table to composite beam forming models located in the ceiling or on the wall able to distinguish the source of speech and optimise accordingly.
Proximity microphones work the best, but you need one for each participant and this not always practical.. It’s also fair to say proximity microphones can vary in price and quality significantly.
Sound processors are additional elements useful to optimise audio. Requiring expertise in set up these cleverly adjust for the sound of the room, filter unwanted elements and compensate for soft spoken participants.
Audio technology for meeting rooms today has come a long way. Even simple systems made for small meeting spaces now come with some clever audio smarts built in. The larger and grander the room, however, the more you need to invest in specialised audio products for the task.
Cameras
Cameras come in a range of options and price points. What you choose depends on the application.
Higher definition is not always the best choice. In video conferencing the more data that is involved the more bandwidth you will need to successfully transmit it to the far end of the conference. If bandwidth is limited, a lower definition camera might be a better choice.
The viewing angle is another important camera specification to consider, particularly for compact meeting spaces in which you need to be able to capture all the participants. If you choose the wrong camera for the seating layout, only some of the participants will be seen.
AI assisted framing is another key camera feature worth understanding. AI control software assesses how many people are in the room and frames the shot according. This now comes with many conferencing packages as standard.
The ability for a camera to move- such as pan, tilt, zoom cameras (PTZ) opens up further possibilities for participant capture. These allow you to determine pre-sets and switch between them as appropriate.
Such options become even more sophisticated when deploying dual camera set-ups. The dual cameras switch between participants based on who is speaking. This is a bit like having a TV studio director nominating which camera to go live.
Not surprisingly the more sophisticated the system, the more expensive it becomes. The payoff is in the experience delivered. Video conferencing where you are able to get camera close ups of participants deliver far greater nuance in facial expression, a difference that may prove invaluable when negotiating or deal making.
Training spaces or theatrettes have additional camera requirements like capturing someone in the audience asking a question. Likewise PTZ cameras can be used in event spaces to enhance their function, putting the keynote speaker on the screen or a discussion panel.
Additional popular choices for education are the AI tracking camera, one able to follow a lecturer or speaker who moves around, or the object camera, one able to display an object on screen for the purpose of discussion.
It all comes down to combining the right camera and control technology for the best result. The Ci Group does this successfully across a range of applications and industries and across a range of meeting room types from low cost huddle spaces to state of the art boardrooms.
High End Technology Furniture
High end technology furniture has long been associated with the Ci Group. It’s one of the key reasons the group has been responsible for more senior executive spaces at top 20 ASX listed companies than any other integrator.
Furniture has major role to play in delivering a better meeting room and video collaboration experience. It can not only determine comfort levels but also the ease of visibility to camera. Customised with the right technology it can also better capture voice with inbuilt microphones, better display complex data with pop up personal screens for each participant and provide within easy reach power and data access for all. All the cabling necessary is neatly distributed within the table itself with allowance made right from the outset.
One of the basics to get right is comfort level. This entails providing sufficient personal space for each person present, ensuring there is sufficient leg room under the table to withstand drawn out meetings, making chair as comfortable as it needs to be and having the table at the right height.
Meeting room geometry is considered another critical success factor. Concentric ring tables, for example, are highly regarded options as they allow good eye to eye contact for all participants present in the room, as well as a less obscured view to camera when used in video mode. Scissor tables are also popular for video application for this reason.
The most sophisticated meeting rooms can be transformed at the press of a button from a between a simple uncluttered meeting space to one optimised by technology for simultaneously analysing fine data and conducting a video conference with multiple remote participants. Such a transformation involves monitors and microphones that pop up from the table, lighting that is appropriate to video conferencing and control that can master several different technology aspects simultaneously.
A common limitation imposed on many boardrooms is when someone commissions a table that is a fine piece of furniture but not able to be technically equipped to any useful extent. This is avoidable as both these objectives can be successfully met if you get us involved soon enough. Our specialist fabricators can also work with the finest of finishes and interior designers. A boardroom table can therefore be made practical and beautiful at the same time.
