Photo courtesy of Sparling Paccar Hall conference rooms have mounted touch screens outside that assist with room scheduling.

The University of Washington hired Sparling to design a state-of-the-art digital audiovisual system for Paccar Hall, a new five-story, 133,000-square-foot building for the Foster School of Business.

Sparling worked with the university to establish new requirements for the classroom AV standards with the goal of making Paccar Hall the first classroom building that is fully digital. The technology improvements included “classroom capture” to bring classroom audio and video directly to the computer so it can be recorded for future broadcast or streamed live to locations off campus.

The new technology also provided new distance-learning capabilities that connect students in remote colleges and rural areas to the school, and allow the university to tie multiple campus classrooms together through video conferencing. In addition, the firm designed digital remote monitoring of classroom facilities for maintenance purposes, and real-time room scheduling using LCD or touch screens mounted at the entrance to lecture halls and conference rooms.

Sparling also created collaborative software to allow large, flexible rooms to be divided into smaller breakout rooms as well as connect numerous student laptops to a network so they can work together on a large screen. The systems provide digital media presentations, room-scheduling displays that provide class information, enable students to schedule breakout rooms, and collaborate among instructors and students.

Because of budget constraints, universities continue to face the challenge of providing students with the tools and technology that is commonplace in business today. However, by networking all of the AV systems, components can be monitored and powered down when not in use to save energy and reduce costs.