Crestron Electronics is enhancing its Intelligent Video portfolio, through the Automate VX multi-camera speaker tracking solution, to create a more immersive and engaging collaboration environment. An increasing demand for multi-camera solutions is reshaping the meeting room experience across larger spaces to enable better experiences through additional camera angles. Automate VX directs the cameras to capture a speaker from multiple perspectives depending on where they are looking so that key moments are always captured to enhance virtual collaboration.
The latest Automate VX update brings new features such as Visual AI Direction, which enables more fluid interactions during meetings as cameras seamlessly switch to capture speakers based on the angles of their face. With this enhancement, Automate VX intelligently selects the camera that shows the clearest view of an active speaker’s face. With this solution, in-person attendees can act naturally to glance around the room to content on the displays or other attendees in the room without worrying about how those moments are captured for virtual attendees. The Visual AI Direction feature leverages edge AI to understand the angle someone is facing to switch from one camera to another so that the speaker remains well-framed and centered while avoiding less optimal shots of the side or back of someone’s head.
By leveraging multiple cameras around a room, Automate VX eliminates reliance on a static, fixed view of participants common in single-camera systems to help virtual participants remain engaged in the meeting. The expanding feature set of Automate VX simplifies the meeting room experience where greater collaboration and improved engagement occur naturally without any worry about the technology in the room.
“We continue to invest in leveraging Visual AI auto-framing and presenter tracking to deliver the most compelling meeting room experience on the market so that participants can contribute and engage with their peers without interruptions,” says Crestron’s EVP of global marketing, Brad Hintze. “By introducing Visual AI Direction technology, we create a dynamic experience where cameras are automatically adjusted and switch flawlessly in real-time, to ensure speakers are highlighted at the right moment and at the right angle for virtual participants. These smooth transitions remove the obstacles of poor camera angles that result in disjointed collaboration from disruptions such as when presentation content is being blocked, or a presenter is facing a different direction.”
Automate VX also provides software tools that enable rooms to be configured ahead of time with simple drag-and-drop functionality. The latest update brings in the ability to add furniture directly to the Intelligent Video Room Designer software making it simple to add tables and chairs to room layouts. These pieces can be scaled and moved around the layout as needed to make space planning more efficient and accurate before finalizing designs. This empowers stakeholders to visualize different furniture configurations ahead of time and enables additional room scenarios to be added to an existing set-up.
[SCN Hybrid World: Room with a (Wide) View]
Another new feature introduction, called Breadcrumbs, enables faster deployments and fine-tuning of the system to accommodate unique acoustic characteristics within a space. Chairs may move, or presenters may move more freely around the room as they speak. To account for these variations, this feature collects the past 100 audio pickups from the microphones in the room to provide important positional data for room usage. These data points allow IT managers to monitor usage and adjust audio pickup locations to yield the best results for room usage and proper switching.
