
Ask HN: What's your conference room tech setup? - wmab
We&#x27;ve been looking into options for setting up our new conference room (~12x12&#x27; with table for 8), and have been finding it hard - the conference room technology scene looks like it&#x27;s stuck in the 90s with old school products at super high prices.<p>Wanted to know what similar startups have opted for for video calls -- we mostly use Zoom and Hangouts and so a simple log in process (iPad?), good camera and good mic for a not-unreasonable price is what we&#x27;re looking for.<p>Appreciate any and all experiences!
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drc37
Our building has 2 T1V Thinkhubs. They are basically large touchscreen panels.
We don't do a lot of video conferencing currently, but we use a polycom phone
for audio. Remote users can login and view the screen and share their screens
with everyone. It's a pretty cool setup. Everyone is wowed by it when they
first see it. The setup consists of 6 screens wide and 2 tall. Each panel is
55". But, you can use the same system on a single panel setup.

Also, this is all controlled by a Crestron unit to control lights and shades
as well as switch between TV, apple TV, Music and T1V.

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trcollinson
We use an owl [0], an iPad for handling scheduling, and a big tv from Costco.
Works very nice. I love the owl. It has a great 360 degree camera setup and
directional microphone with no software requirement.

[0] [https://www.owllabs.com](https://www.owllabs.com)

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wmab
Yeah I have seen the Owl before and haven't had the best experience when I'm
dialing in to a group that is using one. Can you set it up to just work like a
normal camera for when you need a 1 on 1?

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Spooky23
We use a Chromebox and an AppleTV with a polycom phone. Works fabulously.

In our big public facing room, we have a Mersive Soltice device that allows
folks to connect from whatever to the AV setup with a minimum of bullshit.
That’s a bigger room and has ceiling mounted mics. They work amazing but as
with all things audio were a pain in the ass to setup.

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aed
Just went through this in the last year at my current job. Each conference
room had a Mac mini with a keyboard attached and sometimes people used zoom,
sometimes gotomeeting, sometimes hangouts. If you wanted to share a screen
locally, it involved changing inputs on the TV and making sure you have an
HDMI cable with the right dongle. As a result, the rooms were a mess.

Inevitably, it always took some kind of effort to get connected to the correct
system and the meeting started.

After evaluating a few options, we’ve moved to zoom rooms. Our sales team was
already using zoom and it was an easy decision to roll out zoom to everyone.
In my opinion, it was best to have one way and only one way have a meeting.
It’s paid off, because it’s now effortless and default. We're really happy
with it.

The zoom room setup requires an iPad controller and a Mac or PC to run the
zoom software. Everything is setup in kiosk mode and even on reboot, zoom
automatically starts up. I don’t even keep keyboards in the rooms because
there’s no reason to touch anything but the iPad controller (which is also in
kiosk mode so you can't accidentally close the zoom software).

For sharing a screen locally it's done wirelessly and it’s as simple as
clicking “share screen” and most of the time it picks up what room you’re in
and starts sharing your screen (if not, you just type in the sharing code). No
more looking for a cable and dongle. It's pretty cool to be across the room
from the TV and be able to share your screen without friction.

We have 15 zoom rooms now in all of our office globally (New Orleans, Austin,
Cairo).

We do dual-monitor setups in almost all of conference rooms, save for the
smaller huddle rooms. In our new office, I did a 3 monitor setup for a large
conference room. To be able to see faces and content being shared is great.
Product/dev teams love it particularly because it's easy to review specs or
code and see the face of the person you're talking to.

Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, we use Owls (owllabs.com) and have 8 of
them in use globally. The team loves them. Particularly for cross-cultural
conversations it’s helpful that the camera is in the center of the table and
you can see the speaker’s face (vs. being a fly on the wall).

For microphones, we like the VTech VCS704 ErisStation with wireless mics. It’s
trained everyone to think to grab a mic before beginning to speak. We put a
pricey, high quality MXL AC-360-Z in our new conference room and I think I’m
going to switch to a Vtech. There’s just something about the act of grabbing a
mic and putting it right in front of your face. People tend to talk with a
laptop in front of them, or hands in front of their face, or from the end of
the room. There’s something about having a physical object that makes people
stop and grab one before speaking. It’s made me think that microphone sound
isn’t a tech problem so much as it is a people problem.

This is not my primary job but something I took on. Happy to answer any
questions or provide more details about our setup.

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aed
If you want cheap:

In some of our huddle rooms we just have a simple $100 logitech cam with a
jabra usb ($60).

We're also trying out some Logitech Conference Cam BCC950 devices (<$200).

All of our iPad controllers are from the Apple refurb store.

