Towering Intellect

Text:/ Derek Powell

(above) The futuristic Swanson Academic Building towers over the  Victorian-era Oxford Scholar Hotel like an alien predator poised to subsume it.
Photographer: John Gollings courtesy RMIT.

IN CONTROL

The AV control systems are AMX (mostly seven-inch Modero touch panels with large ELO touch panels and TPI Pros in the bigger rooms); however the switching is all Crestron Digital Media. An AMX Room Management System watches over all of the AV systems, providing monitoring and warning of any equipment failures.

Where possible, all equipment control is implemented over IP rather than by RS-232. McFadden plans to make this the standard into the future and told me that the new building required around 2100 IP addresses in the AV system alone. “It was quite a change,” he said. “Prior to the SAB we only had about 2000 AV-related IP addresses across the whole university. This building doubled that at one stroke.”

A showcase room is the fully kitted-out 180-seat cinema, which McFadden noted is used for Cinema Studies courses. As well as a pair of Mitsubishi WD8200U WXGA projectors for standard teaching, a Panasonic PJ-DZ1200E 12,000 ANSI lumen full HD projector lurks in the projection booth for movie presentations. Celluloid is also fully catered for with two Kinoton 35mm film projectors packing 2kW lamp-houses. One of the projectors is dual gauge, allowing 16mm film presentation as well. There is a full motorised drape system up front so the screen can be masked to the correct aspect ratio for different cinema formats. “We all had to do a conversion course to get up to speed on sprockets,” McFadden commented wryly. “Luckily, one of the guys here on site is a fully-qualified cinema projectionist and he just loves operating in there.”

Naturally, audio hasn’t been forgotten and the cinema has been designed to conform to THX specifications should RMIT decide to opt for certification. A Dolby CP6500X processor handles decoding of movie soundtracks and feeds purpose-built Electro-Voice cinema-grade power amplifiers and speaker systems configurable for up to 9.2 channel sound. Naturally, the front EV speakers sit discreetly behind the perforated screen.

COLLABORATIVE CLASSROOMS

“Apart from the main lecture theatres and cinema, there are very few traditional ‘face-the-front’ classrooms,” McFadden explained. “Most of the teaching is based around student collaboration, with a lot of six-seat tables in the smaller rooms.”

Display in these collaborative classrooms is managed by a combination of AV and IT techniques. We are now firmly in the era of BYOD (bring your own device) computing and there are no PCs provided for student use in the teaching rooms. Instead, students participate by logging in from their own laptops, tablets or i-devices to their university ‘virtual desktop’. Once there, they can use TeamSpot software to connect wirelessly to each other or to the lecturer’s PC at the front of the room. With the matching ClassSpot software, the academic can then choose to take output from any student’s machine and display it on the projector.

In the ‘project rooms’, each six-seat group table has access via TeamSpot to an adjacent wall mounted 55‑inch (1.4m) LCD monitor. For teacher-led sessions, the academic’s PC is connected directly to all monitors. To further simplify the audiovisual switching in these rooms, an Epson DC11 document camera is connected via USB to the house PC at the lecturer’s station. To show the camera, the academic simply uses software to display the camera on the PC output. The classrooms also feature lots of writable surfaces and a number include TeamBoard 87-inch (2.2m) interactive whiteboards.

DIGITAL SIGNAGE

Spread throughout the building are more than 90 digital signage displays based on the NEC Live platform. As well as the more conventional large LCD information displays, there are a couple of special interactive implementations. In the SAB, academics don’t have individual offices; there are open-plan spaces on several of the floors. These spaces are secured using access cards so at each office area entrance, there is a 22-inch (560mm) NEC touchscreen display that allows visitors and students to search the phone number of the person they wish to visit. Outside the large lecture theatres, a similar-sized monitor shows the timetable for that room – very handy when literally thousands of students attend classes in the theatres each day. Finally, in the foyer, there is a scrolling LED ‘ticker’ display that runs 23 metres around the atrium walls.

RMIT University has certainly made a powerful statement from the outside with the striking architecture of the SAB building, but with around seven and a half million dollars of audiovisual fit-out, the interior speaks equally powerfully about their commitment to the student experience.