International. The new 145,000-square-foot Allied Health Veterans Hall at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington - UNCW features a variety of audio-visual systems that are carefully designed for each unique space.
The building houses THE first UNCW instructional spaces designed from the ground up such as active learning classrooms, state-of-the-art health labs, problem-based learning rooms, and a variety of spaces for collaboration.
Consultant Affiliated Engineers, Inc. designed the complete installation and KONTEK Systems, Inc. provided the integration. Each room includes its own flexible DTP presentation system, with a variety of additional extron audio and control products. For centralized management and lesson capture, AV systems are connected to the Distance Education - DE control room via an Extron NAV Pro AV over IP enterprise network system.
UNCW chose the NAV design to unite the rooms for many reasons. Tests showed that NAV was stable, robust and delivered a lossless visual signal. The system was easy to manage for support staff from the DE control room, and all control system programming could be done in-house. In addition, NAV provided the ability to control or limit bandwidth, if needed.
"Connecting the cameras and microphones to each room's local system and distance education control room has proven to be a huge benefit in this age of Covid," said Robb Mann, CTS-I, Manager of Integrated Educational Technologies, ITS at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. "We use the NAV AVoIP system to direct lessons anywhere, as well as capture every session, which meets all of our social distancing needs and has huge positive implications for the future."
Extron NAVE101 1G encoders and NAVSD101 1G scale decoders were deployed for each room and system with 10G uplinks to central aggregate switches. NAV models are compatible with 10G terminals, eliminating the need for additional devices.
Control room operators can monitor all ongoing sessions and correct any issues when or even before they arise. Several remote operation capabilities are facilitated over the NAV system, including audio mixing and control of PTZ cameras. UNCW also appreciated that NAV is an economical solution, which helped keep the project under budget.
