Part of this integration involved relocating some of the resources from offices in central London and recognized the need for a series of 11 meeting rooms to be equipped with multimedia and videoconferencing support. Located in Building B - where some of the company's Gas, Power and Renewables businesses are located - each would be differently configured but with a standard template and control. Given the number of staff on site the rooms could expect little down time.
All have now been equipped by Pendax UK, and the largest - The Willow Room - utilizes two dnp 84in New Wide Angle rear projection screens, which challenged all the integration company's powers of design. Backtracking, BP's Steve Kerr, who was responsible for the procurement, stated: "It became obvious we needed to upgrade our meeting rooms to support a variety of collaboration activities. We decided to look at the meeting room space and add a variety of capabilities, divided between 41in TFT and 61in plasma displays."
But in the Willow Room they needed a more sophisticated solution. "We considered a plasma option but it wouldn't have been big enough; we could also have had two ceiling-mounted front projectors, but I was worried about the noise. Rear projection was one of the better options because it is quiet and the audience can stand in front of the screen without casting a shadow."
BP had been keen to create this visually-enhanced environment to support business and commercial decision-making. Such a facility would complement the more sophisticated HIVEs (Highly Immersive Visualisation Environments) where a wide, curved screen uses three edge-blend DLP projectors to allow three-dimensional computer models of underground geology to be manipulated stereoscopically.
"Since we would be dealing with numerical data in The Willow Room, reading digits in the corner of the display would be as important as reading it in the middle," reports Steve. After being awarded the contract, Pendax UK's AV systems design consultant, Graham Salvage, was tasked with the challenge of creating flexibility and high picture gain from the dnp rig, with simplicity of control. Since the screen needed to be driven from two laptop sources the displays had to be edge-butted (rather than edge-blended).
Salvage recalls that one suggestion had been for a three-image media display, with tiling anywhere on the main screen. "But I advised that since BP would be using native SXGA Plus (1400 x 1050) resolution, viewing three images with a scaler would have degraded the picture."
And so they recommended a pair of 84" NWA dnp screens, cutting them to 80in and butting them together with just a 2mm mullion spacer. But if this solved the front-end problem, Pendax UK now had to deal with the retro-end where only one metre of space was available.Using the Paradigm Easy Erect rig they selected Barco IQ Reality projectors, whose native 1400 x 1050 resolution matched that of the BP computers and was designed so it could be driven from its twin-headed PC, stationed in The Willow Room (where there are four laptop access points). This enabled them to view a single large image, stretched across both screens, or addressed separately. "It was a very tight space so we had to use ultra wide angle, short-throw lenses ... the widest we could buy," confirms Salvage.
BP's external video playback sources are brought up to 1400 x 1050 resolution using an external scaler, and via the Extron CrossPoint Plus 8 x 4 RGB-HV Matrix Router it can place any image on either of its screens.Like the rest of the multimedia design, BP's videoconferencing facilities are under Crestron con
