Huddle Room Technology (HRT) recently unveiled the Huddle Hub One, the company’s first product designed to supplement current AV technologies in order to enhance user experiences.
Placed in a huddle room, Huddle Hub One connects the local participants’ laptops and mobile devices—up to six of them. Huddle Hub One receives a video stream from each camera and combines these into a single stream. It then sends this combined stream to any standard communication software running on the videoconference host computer, which receives this stream as if coming from a single webcam.
At the same time, Huddle Hub One mirrors the screen of the videoconference host computer to the screen of the laptops and mobile devices. The result is that the participants in the huddle room take part in the videoconference as if they were individually connected to it, and instead of squeezing themselves together to fit into the frame of a camera they can comfortably sit anywhere in the room.
Huddle Hub One improves the experience of remote participants too. It performs speaker detection and returns a combined image layer with all the participants’ faces, highlighting the active speaker. By making the faces of the participants more visible—compared to the image returned by an ordinary webcam, even a wide angle one—and naturally guiding them to look into the camera, Huddle Hub One brings eye-to-eye contact to an unprecedented level and makes nonverbal communication much easier to perceive.
Huddle Hub One can be configured and managed through an intuitive browser based interface. The devices (e.g. laptops, tablets, smartphones) connect wirelessly to Huddle Hub One via dedicated desktop and mobile apps.
Built inside a solid aluminum case, Huddle Hub One is a compact, fan-less device that can be placed anywhere in the room, or mounted behind a flat panel display.
