So What Does “Meeting Equity” Mean, Exactly?
Bukshteyn touched on it in his remarks at the Modern Work Summit: Meeting equity is about every participant having the ability to hear and be heard, see and be seen, no matter where they’re physically located. A single camera on the short wall of a large conference room doesn’t deliver the best experience for every meeting type. That “view down a bowling alley” robs remote participants of seeing gestures, processing inflections properly, and taking in all the nonverbal cues that make human interactions, well, human.
Auto-tracking camera technology — keying on and framing a speaker as they’re talking with the use of multiple cameras — is vital to the equation. “Another frustration we heard from Ilya was the inability of static, single-shot solutions to switch the shot when a presenter rose to speak with their back to the camera,” says Kennedy. In addition to blocking the view of other in-person collaborators, that angle wasn’t exactly what one would call flattering.
The Automate VX solution is flexible, too. “There are a variety of modes and settings that allow the end user to create the composite display image that best suits their needs,” says Cara Shannon, Crestron’s senior manager of product marketing. There’s a “Conversation Mode,” for example, that leaves two speakers on display at the same time, side-by-side, even as one of the two stops talking to yield to the next speaker. An internal setting will eventually shift to a speaker as the other party stops talking for a time (and the length of that “two-shot” is also customizable). Additionally, there’s an option to include a wide shot of the entire room in the frame, a feature that provides needed context for most users: It shows how all the meeting attendees are reacting at a given moment.