Why a second camera belongs on the table, not the wall

Making hybrid meetings work for people taking part remotely is a challenge whose contours are now becoming more widely understood – at least by the better class of AV consultants and integrators.

But while there is an increasing appreciation of the problems that need to be overcome, there is less agreement on what the solution should be.

Stepping into this vortex of possibilities is a new class of products, or what might more accurately be described as a revival and reimagining of an older product idea.

This is the 360° (or near 360°) camera placed in the centre of the tabletop in a meeting room. This time around it is not a standalone product but a companion to a camera mounted by or incorporated into a screen at the end of the room.

Several companies now have AI-powered cameras of this type on the way and prominent among them is Logitech, which announced the Sight 315°, AI-powered camera last month.

Following the announcement, AV Magazine attended a presentation given by John Tracey, head of Logitech University and sales enablement, and put some searching questions about the relative merits of tabletop and wall-mounted cameras to him.

As Tracey tells the story, Logitech considered several ways of tackling the challenge of making hybrid meetings more equitable and inclusive in a journey that began a couple of years ago.

To begin with, the company developed a whiteboard camera, Scribe, as an alternative to digital whiteboards that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. “There’s something about a real pen and a real whiteboard,” Tracey says.

When placed above a whiteboard, the camera feed can be connected to a Teams or Zoom call. The smart camera then uses artificial intelligence to give the remote participant a clearer view, correcting the perspective with which the board is seen and ghosting out the presenter, rather than giving the remote viewer a close-up of their backside.

Another step forward, introduced a few weeks ago, is the addition of Show Mode to Logitech Brio webcams. With Show Mode, a remote meeting participant doesn’t even need a whiteboard to share an idea. They can just draw on a piece of paper on their desk, and move the webcam down so that it picks up the image, adjusts the perspective and flips the image over if need be. When finished, the webcam can be rolled back up and the user can continue with their call.

But these advances in sharing ideas, don’t tackle the central problem with inclusiveness in hybrid meetings. This is the problem that when everyone was working remotely during pandemic lockdowns, we were all seen in squares on a screen and were on an equal footing. Now, the remote participant is at a disadvantage when faced with an image of lots of people who are actually in the meeting room. They can’t see individual faces clearly, pick up on body language or make their presence felt in a discussion anywhere near as easily.

To deal with this Logitech now has its version of voice tracking, Speaker View. With Speaker View the camera focuses on the person speaking, moving to the next person as they begin talking, while there is still a view of the whole room so that the reactions of other people can be seen.

Also available now is Grid View which identifies the dominant group of people in the room, and presents them either individually in a grid or as a single image (depending on the capabilities of the videoconferencing platform used), eliminating the empty space around them. This lets the remote viewer get a more up-close-and-personal view of people in the room.

But there is still a problem left over, after these AI-camera advances. And this is that people in the room like talking to each other, and when they start conversing with each other, the view that remote participants get is of the side of their faces.

“I’ve spent so many meetings looking at the side of people’s heads, I can actually identify people by the side of their heads better than I can by their faces,” says Tracey.

This where the AI-powered camera on the table with a 360° view of the room comes in. But not by itself.

“With a 360° camera, we can see people’s faces when they’re looking across the table at each other. But the minute somebody on the screen speaks, they all turn and look at the screen, and the camera in the middle of the table gets a shot of the side of their heads. And it gets worse because you then have multiple views of multiple people’s sides of heads,” Tracey says.

The final alternative considered was having lots of cameras wall-mounted in the room. Here you might have cameras to the left of you, cameras to the right of you and a camera mounted in front by the screen. Everyone in the room can be seen from multiple angles.

“The problem with this is that multiple cameras are expensive,” says Tracey. The room we are speaking in even has a partition for one wall, which is just one one of many problems you could have actually mounting AI-powered cameras on a wall, itself a costly enterprise if modern building standards are to be adhered to.

The solution then is to have an AI camera in the centre of the room that complements the camera on the screen, with the view seen by the person at home co-ordinated by software which acts as an AI director.

With this solution, there are two cameras in a video bar at the front of the room and two cameras within the Sight tabletop unit in the centre. The artificial intelligence searches for peoples’ faces and switches from one view to another with no user intervention required. With microphones built into the tabletop camera, there is also greater fidelity in capturing the speech of people around the room.

Logitech’s Sight which embodies this concept, is actually a 315° camera, rather than a 360° model, with a field of view that resembles a Pac-man character. “We dont’ do 360° because we’ve already got a camera at the front of the room. We’re actually using two lenses that overlap. They are brought in slightly so you always get a front-of-face view,” Tracey says.

The solution comes with dual 4K cameras and seven mics with beamforming technology and a pickup radius of seven and a half feet (2.3m). It is easy-to-install and plug-and-play with the major platforms.

“It will work in rooms from about six seats up to about 10 or 15. Shortly after launch, we will allow you to have two of these on a table,” Tracey says.

This all sounds very good, but AV Magazine wondered whether the cost and difficulty of mounting was all there was to be said about locating additional AI-powered cameras on a meeting-room wall, an option that other manufacturers are taking very seriously.

Even if you have the perfect meeting room, with walls that are not made of glass and are not removable, there are still problems with mounting, Tracey says.

“To get an eye-level connection, you are either going to have to embed it into the wall, which costs a lot of money, or it is going to be sticking out at waist level and you know what people are like. They walk into a room, laptop in one hand, coffee in the other. That’s why we didn’t even build a room like that,” Tracey says.

Yes, a camera mounted at the right height will get a beautiful shot of a speaker opposite, but that is provided no one is seated between camera and speaker and no one is walking past.

“If you’ve placed a camera in the back of the room, you’ve almost become a second-row citizen because you’re trying to peer over someone’s head to look at the conversation,” Tracey’s colleague says.

To get round the second-row citizen problem, couldn’t the AI-camera be mounted higher up on the wall and still get a good view of people in the room with some fancy AI trickery?

“We can do keystone correction which is what we do with the whiteboard camera (Scribe), but it only works so far. There are laws of physics that dictate what you can do,” Tracey says.

Another more psychological problem is the reaction of what you might call normal people to seeing multiple cameras surveilling them from a wall. “We sometimes get a little bit blase because we use this technology every single day of the week but people still have this fear of being on camera,” Tracey says. “You can see it when people walk into a room and put a post-it note over a camera.”

It is much easier to simply slide the cover up over Logitech’s tabletop 315° camera Sight and have peace of mind, than to worry about whether you’ve covered every wall and screen-mounted camera with a lens cap.

“In the right room, in the right set-up, wall-mounted cameras can work,” allows Tracey, “but what we found is that for most organisations, ,the up-front cost of installing it would put them off.”