Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms represents Microsoft’s vision for a more collaborate hybrid meeting experience. Born out of the opportunity to enhance hybrid meetings for the flexible workforce, Teams Rooms evolved as an innovative, new way to design hybrid-optimized spaces that foster more inclusive and human interactions.
“Teams Rooms is our solution for Microsoft Teams in shared spaces, and most predominantly, conference rooms,” said Matt Taylor, Director of Product Marketing for Microsoft Teams. “With most meetings today involving a mix of in-person and remote attendees, we are embracing true flexible work. The goal is to improve the meeting experience across software, hardware and furniture design optimized for multiple users throughout the day and a hybrid-first scenario.”
A major component of Teams Rooms is the use of video displays. With Planar as the display solution provider for Signature Teams Rooms, users can realize the benefits of fine-pitch LED video wall technology. “The experience is elevated with a larger, high-definition display, which allows remote participants to appear life size,” Taylor said.
Hybrid Meetings for High Impact Spaces
To demonstrate how Teams Rooms can apply to a boardroom setting, Microsoft built a boardroom archetype at the Executive Briefing Center (EBC) on Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash.-based campus headquarters. Offering customers executive-level engagement opportunities to collaborate on transformative digital initiatives, the EBC works to inspire customers through immersive demos, presentations of real-life customer solutions and examples of Microsoft’s technology and thought leadership.
The boardroom archetype at the EBC features a nearly 12-foot-wide, 5.5-foot-high Planar® DirectLight® Series LED video wall with a 0.9mm pixel pitch and was designed with a Crestron Automate VX multi-camera system and an 85- inch Surface Hub for collaboration and whiteboarding.
“The reason for designing this space was to ultimately answer the question that we’ve received from many customers as to how Teams Rooms can work in boardroom format and scenario,” Taylor said. “It’s a blueprint if you will that is available for customers to use as they see fit—either for replicating or for learning and building upon. Specifically, the boardroom archetype showcases how Microsoft technologies, along with our partners like Planar, are addressing flexible work in high-impact spaces.”
According to Taylor, the Planar LED video wall in the EBC space helps support Microsoft’s intentions to demonstrate how stronger connections can be built in hybrid meetings between remote and in-person attendees. Among the multiple views users can select in Teams Rooms, the “Front Row” option positions remote attendees on the video wall front-and-center and at eye-level with in-room participants. “With that setting, you get the feeling that people joining remotely are sitting at the same table with you,” Taylor said.
As a larger format display, the Planar LED video wall also provides more screen real estate for sharing content and for using other Teams Rooms features during hybrid meetings such as a panel for raised hands and chat within a meeting, Taylor said. “The video wall is very impressive and incredibly crisp. It enables more of the intuitive experiences that really help to reduce meeting fatigue and make discussions feel more lifelike.”
