Organisations have now become familiar with the need to equip their offices and workers with the right tools to communicate and collaborate effectively. In offices, the challenge is to accommodate the changing needs of workers, visitors, and collaborators. Traditional approaches of configuring an event space or meeting room now need to take account of and enable different use cases at different times.
This flexibility is outside of the scope of classic audio solutions but increasingly in-demand from organisations that have embraced flexible and hybrid working and the need for their office spaces to perform multiple tasks. One example is a recent installation at one of Europe’s largest mineral producers by smart technology and office design specialist, Coodart, who was engaged to transform the company’s head office, relying on new communications technologies as part of the upgrade.
The project included modernisation of the existing boardroom so it could also act as a space for colleagues to meet and collaborate both virtually and in-person. In addition, flexible office space was required that featured reliable and robust conferencing technologies. Coodart selected the Shure Stem Ecosystem to address all these needs.
The Ecosystem, which was awarded the 2022 Global Enabling Technology Leadership Award from Frost & Sullivan, comprises a fully customisable portfolio that integrates seamlessly with other communication platforms such as Barco ClickShare and Huddly cameras, among others. The solutions chosen by Coodart included Stem table and ceiling microphones and speakers, combined with the Stem Hub to connect all devices together. The system, easy to use and install, offers flexibility to add more devices as required.
This proved to be an immediate benefit as the project developed from an initial brief to create a collaborative and comfortable working environment to a complete redesign of the conference room’s aesthetics to enhance acoustics. The room is more than 14 metres in length so audio pickup was an important factor to take into consideration.
The Shure Stem Ecosystem has also been installed at the new feature exhibit: Reverberations: A Future for Memory, at the Sydney Jewish Museum in Australia. This interactive exhibition details the humanity and life experiences of Holocaust survivors who, in recent years, have shared their stories in person with visitors. They are brought face to face with a life size image of a survivor waiting patiently on an 86-inch monitor screen, hung in portrait mode on the wall. There are no visible buttons and interaction via artificial intelligence (AI) controls is driven by voice, captured by a Shure Stem Ceiling microphone that hovers above.
The microphone connects across a digital network to a Stem Hub that interfaces with the computer to instantly select the most appropriate answer from the hundreds of stored clips and send the video to the monitor, and sound, via the Hub, to the Shure Stem Speaker mounted in the ceiling. While originally devised for videoconferencing applications in meeting rooms, the unique intelligent beamforming capabilities of the microphone and the architecture of the entire Shure Stem Ecosystem work brilliantly to enable true duplex conversation with the AI language processing system.
The Shure ecosystem has been designed to enable various use cases to be addressed and to have the flexibility to adapt to organisations’ changing demands, as these two examples demonstrate. “We are constantly rolling out new firmware updates to ensure the product never goes end of life, is always future compatible, and always meets the needs of the customer,” explains James Hill, Director, System Sales, Shure.
“The Stem ecosystem is designed to take the complexity out of meeting rooms.”
Discover more about the Shure Stem Ecosystem.
