Every organisation’s IT and audiovisual departments had their own unique challenges in adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The video conferencing explosion in 2020 covered many bases in addressing UC and collaboration needs, but there were inevitably unforeseen quirks that demanded invention for everyday work processes to continue as best they could.
The story of the Royal Academy, a 250-year-old arts institution in London, is especially peculiar and especially delightful.
“It’s run by artists who are voted in as Royal Academicians, and we had this challenge with general assembly meetings being held quarterly, where they vote in new Academicians, and interestingly, there is a law around how you vote in Academicians,” Benji Fox, Head of Audiovisual at the Royal Academy, outlined to UC Today.
The challenge came when the sign-off of some decisions required people to be ‘present’ in person at a time when travel was virtually impossible.
There was one law that to be able to vote in, the Academician had to be present. We changed the meaning of that law to say that online can count as being present, which was signed by the Queen. That was the level of sign-off we had!”
Talk about a workplace hierarchy.
“It meant we could deploy a usable hybrid system for being able to vote in Academicians,” Fox said. “So we brought in a voting system, and we used SHURE MXCW and multiple PTZ cameras to emphasise the equal seat at the table. That’s really important. We take that ethos with hybrid meetings where every member of the meeting, whether they’re online or at the table, has the same seat, so to speak.”
Meeting equity, ratified by the Queen.
Fox and his “very small” audiovisual team have an expansive remit at the Royal Academy, with their audiovisual installation work encompassing specialised exhibition lighting and network control in individual galleries. Fox and his team also run the events programme, such as overseeing the renowned Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, which was updated post-COVID with new equipment, including an Epson projector.
Fox and the Royal Academy also recently invested in their hybrid meeting and hybrid event technology for it to be broadcast-grade. It’s been a significant installation. “In some ways, a steep learning curve, and it’s been a full team effort,” Fox said. “So we have almost three full modular systems for PTZ deployment for events, multiple camera angles and mixing and recording, which is really good.”
The Royal Academy leverage multiple systems and platforms for its work. Zoom is mostly for video conferencing, with Slack and Teams for messaging.
Another specific quirk for Fox’s management of the Royal Academy’s tech stack is that the Academy itself is a Grade 2-listed building, which means they don’t have “integrated rack rooms and any hybrid meeting space has to be modular and deployed quickly,” Fox explained.
“Obviously, they can’t just be usable but have to involve the best possible user interaction,” with Fox and his team carefully considering the audience for online and hybrid events when managing these technologies. Each audience member should have the “same seat”, echoing Fox’s ethos on hybrid meetings.
As AV technicians specialising in cameras and sound, four years ago, Fox didn’t particularly have a refined ethos on hybrid meetings, but then “all of a sudden a need for hybrid meeting spaces” appeared from nowhere, “but we didn’t have the capacity or knowledge to deliver it”.
“We went through a bit of a test period where we were trying out different microphones,” Fox elaborated. “Some of our meeting rooms can be very big, and you can have up to 20 people attending a table, to very small, so modular and expandable. I’ll say the word modular quite a lot! You have to find alternatives in our situation.”
The budget was a consideration, as always. There is a more modern part of the building, staff accommodation with a meeting room which does have a Zoom room, but for modular stuff, we use SHURE MXCW system with Ava PTZ. So we tried using tracked PTZ in meeting room scenarios initially with everybody having a gooseneck microphone, and it meant that everybody online could hear individuals perfectly.”
The number of UC and collaboration use cases specific to the Royal Academy is remarkable and testifies to the inventiveness of Fox and his staff and the versatility and scalability of the technology they used.
Fox noted how integral the technical solution is to the user experience — how even a subtle tweak here and there to the system in place can make that exhibition, lecture, event or meeting significantly more valuable and insightful to the user. For a user base whose ages range from their 30s to their 80s and whose experience with UC and collaboration technology ranges just as wildly, those tweaks matter.
“There are a 100 different ways to deliver a system, but actually, consideration in how our users use the system or how it’s deployed matters,” Fox said.
Naturally, it’s been a learning process. “There’s been some careful handholding,” Fox added.
“With the share system (in video conferencing), you have the capability for a microphone to go live based on amplitude, but we found that sometimes there could be a lot of crosstalk. We actually took away that capability, and we introduced microphone etiquette. If you wanted to talk, you had to push to talk.”
“It’s an interesting way that the technology could influence ‘good behaviour’ in meeting rooms. When there’s a lot of crosstalk in a meeting, it’s impossible to follow it online, and so that introduction of etiquette meant that you could hear what was being said rather than relying on technology to have to find a way to deliver it. We had to change the behaviour of our interaction with the technology.”
Working in such a niche area, even with Fox and his colleagues’ inventiveness with the technology available to them, there will inevitably be absent functionalities they would appreciate being introduced by vendors.
“We deliver events to Zoom webinars,” Fox said. “It’s by no means unique, but what we did in the first lockdown was try and keep an events programme running without the technology investment of cameras, and we couldn’t meet because of Covid.”
“So we came up with a thing which we coined ‘Zoom Inception’, which is where we would have individual callers within one Zoom meeting. They would be pinned on separate laptops, and those laptops would be going into a vision mixer. We actually audio-mixed those so we could use as many laptops as possible. We maxed out at four laptops for an event. Then for the vision mixer, we reproduced the event and outputted it to a Zoom webinar for the audience.”
“We recorded a high-quality recording of that inline before it met Zoom, but since then, a lot has changed. We still deliver Zoom webinars, but the backend and how we meet have changed. We could record, edit and deliver a 4K feed, and it’s really important for us to have quality legacy content that delivers this, but we’ve never been able to record an HD cloud recording on Zoom, which is the one thing that would just be fantastic.”
“We have a redundancy recording in Zoom we can rely on with HD. The best we’ve got is a 640-pixel output, which is a real shame. It means it’s not quality enough. It’s fine for capturing a meeting, but not quality enough for us to use as content, but maybe it’s a niche case.”
If you were being corny, you could say Fox treats AV and UC technology as an art form befitting his institution. His enthusiasm for experimenting with technology to test how it might contribute towards the Royal Academy’s mission extends to future investments, too.
“Obviously, we keep our eyes on the influence of AI and whether that can be employed in the business,” he suggested. “It would be surprising, I guess, for an arts institution, but we’re also experimental. I wouldn’t suggest we’re cutting-edge, but in our exhibitions at the moment, we have examples of AR. In the past, we’ve done early experiments in XR, which is such a growth area in broadcast and film and extends an influence over exhibitions.”
The influence of AI on being able to do things quicker and easier and needing less equipment. I think it’s very exciting.”
Beyond AI, Fox is looking at expanding the Royal Academy’s AV over IP (networked AV) systems.
“As the quality expands, just having absolutely everything networked rather than running audio and video separately is really going to be a growth area which will influence everything from meeting rooms to lecture theatres,” Fox concludes. “It’s the quality. That technology exists and is employed in lots of places, networked audio and video.”
Those investments certainly sound compelling — even if they don’t require sign-off by the King.
