Hybrid meetings are the new challenge. Logitech came up with something to ensure more equal opportunities.
Web conferences with Zoom & Co are now well established after more than two years of mobile working. Everyone looks into their own camera and sees everyone else in a grid on their screen.
But with hybrid meetings, where some participants sit in one conference room and others at another location or in the home office, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Logitech has now announced a new product called Sight, which is intended to make it easier for remote participants to participate in a local meeting.
This is how Logitch envisions a space for hybrid meetings with Sight.
challenges and solutions
Typical conference room setup currently has a large screen at the front of the room and above or below a video bar that has camera(s), speakers and a microphone array. It is available from numerous manufacturers. The video bars work very well so far, but have weaknesses that result from the spatial arrangement. As a distant participant, it’s easy to feel left out because you’re more on the sidelines of a discussion than in the thick of it.
Logitech Sight is intended to complement the in-house video bars Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini. Standing in the middle of the conference room, she is supposed to work with two 4K cameras that capture all participants from all sides except for the front of the room, as well as with a microphone array that specifically picks out the voice of the current speaker. Rally Bar and Sight work according to Logitech’s ideas as a system that delivers a video stream on which you can see the entire room situation and also see the person currently speaking in individual images. Depending on whether a speaker is looking at the screen on the front side or at other participants in the room, the camera perspective of these individual images changes.
Different approaches to hybrid meetings
So far, Logitech has only shown a simulation of how Sight is supposed to work. In it, a speaker first looks across the table and then at the distant participant on the screen. At that moment, the system changes the perspective from the Sight to the camera in the Rally Bar. The magic of this solution stands and falls with the software.
Incidentally, Microsoft wants to meet this challenge differently. The company has already presented a vision in which the entire meeting room is set up differently. There the screen is on the long side of the room and the table is semi-circular occupied from one side only. Distant participants then appear to sit across from local participants.
A camera in the center of the table already exists in the form of the Meeting Owl, which carries an all-round camera on top. This works fine, but making eye contact is difficult because the distant participants are rarely in the line of sight of the local participants.
A meeting table with Logitech Sight
A matter of point of view
In a background discussion, Logitech developers shared further considerations from the four-year development process. Initially, the idea of ​​installing cameras on several sides of the meeting room was considered. However, this idea failed mainly because of the necessary camera height, where you always seem to be looking down from above. A height was then chosen for the sight that can still look over the opened laptop screen, but at the same time is low enough for local participants to be able to look over the sight to the other side of the table.
Logitech Sight is scheduled to be available worldwide by mid-next year at a price of around 2400 euros and will only work with the Logitech Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini. With the microphone array, Sight also replaces the micro pods in larger rooms. The use of several sights in a large meeting room is being considered but not yet implemented.
