Untangling The Cords; How Huddle Spaces Make Your Office Less Cluttered

It is 2 a.m., the last night of finals week, and your group project is due in six hours. You and your partners stumble into the one remaining available study room in the building, fueled on Red Bull and 7-Eleven coffee, intent on hammering out the last few presentation slides.

Your saving grace? The room's plethora of audiovisual equipment. Your doom? The mess of cords, the maze of inputs and outputs, and the time that will be wasted by you and your classmates trying to connect laptops and iPads to a projector which, after all this, still won't output the content you need shown on screen.

The concept of the huddle space — a room specifically designed to accommodate collaborative audiovisual equipment — is not exclusive to college students or business people. Companies around the globe build rooms decked out with audiovisual equipment to connect their workspaces, but simply owning AV technology doesn’t always cut it.

Configuration According To Space

Prior to installation, customers must evaluate must-have functions for the room’s primary display, such as power buttons, inputs and outputs, volume controls and HDMI capabilities as well as ensuring the network can be easily accessed by anyone in the room. Projector placement is always a consideration in larger conference rooms, smaller huddle spaces and group study rooms. A content-sharing device such as AMX Acendo Core allows users to mirror content from a mobile device, share documents, view presentations or browse the web.

It is imperative to consider whether the AV network your business employs is built with the huddle space in mind. High-quality sound and HD video is a must, but not nearly as important — or as frequently considered — as network security and isolation. When building your network, room placement is key. A huddle space near the lobby or entrance of a building could be tethered to guest or building-wide WiFi, reducing connection strength and rendering it difficult to load videos and complex presentations in a timely manner. Rooms closer to the building center typically require less stringent configurations.

Configuration According To Purpose

Huddle spaces are proliferating across a wide variety of users, and business is merely one of them. Colleges and universities are turning to AV control to guide learning and teaching, often on much larger scales than a midsize company.

Take, for instance, the case of the University of Torino in Turin, Italy. The Law and Political Science faculty implemented a BSS Soundweb London audio signal processing system equipped for PC and microphone audio processing across 28 classrooms, six lecture halls and an assembly hall that is home to lecture events and concerts.

Most students practice some form of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Students use PCs, tablets and USB devices with different AV outputs and signal types, which can make it tricky to navigate between cords and wires to get the source you want to see and hear on screen. Consolidating all necessary connections through tools such as an AMX Hydraport architectural connectivity system allows students and teachers to customize input to their specific devices, reducing hassle and enabling users to focus on their work.

AV tech users in universities, businesses and just about any facility with meeting or conference rooms often book meeting rooms through scheduling systems like AMX Acendo Book, making the process of reserving rooms easy and efficient. These wall-mounted room scheduling devices make it simple to view all of the day's available meeting times for each room, and if no times are available, the closest room that is open. The display and side LEDs even glow red or green to immediately indicate a room's availability, even from down the hall.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania leverages such technology across a series of rooms, empowering students and staff to book group study rooms in advance to study and collaborate on projects. Every room comes equipped with whiteboards and projectors to make presentations and group homework efforts easier for a school whose notoriously difficult quantitative courses require a great deal of collaborative effort.

After all, ain't no (study) party like one that's planned in advance!

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