Best Layouts For Your Conference Rooms

Best Layouts For Your Conference Rooms


As technology has improved, video conferencing is now a necessity to make hybrid and flexible work environments effective. With this new normal, every conferencing space is now expected to utilize video conferencing equipment. Designing conference rooms with these new developments in mind can be tough, especially when you also need to factor in the aesthetic presentation of the room and the audio equipment needed to effectively cover the room. To make things easy on you, we’ve created a number of different sample layouts for your conference rooms that make the audio solution easy with the Stem Ecosystem.
 

Huddle Rooms

Huddle rooms are small rooms designed for 4-6 people to meet casually and quickly, brainstorm together and collaborate with other small teams. When designing these rooms, versatility should be at the forefront so that any team in the company can use it for their own projects.

Due to the small size of the room, designing for video conferencing is relatively simple. A table that can sit up to six people and easily view a display on one side of the room should be good enough for most circumstances.

Audio solutions for the room are just as simple. A standalone speakerphone like Stem Wall or Table mounted beneath the display or on the table should be enough to cover the room. If your want your audio solution to be out of the picture, you can also mount a Stem Ceiling above the conferencing space and mount one or more Stem Speakers on the wall.

Medium-sized Conference Room

Medium conference rooms can seat anywhere from 6-16 people and are usually the primary meeting space for smaller companies or locations. Mid-sized rooms can be the most difficult to design due to their awkward size – too small for some solutions, too large for others.

Rooms designed for video conferencing work best with rectangular or U-shaped table formats, where all participants can see and be seen by the camera or display setup with a swivel of the neck. Circular or oval-shaped tables will often force some participants to have to turn their backs to either the camera or the other participants in the room.

Audio solutions for mid-sized rooms have traditionally been awkward due to the space being too large for typical BYOD solutions and too small to warrant the cost of a full integration. 

The Stem Ecosystem

 gives you a much simpler solution – by mixing and matching whatever devices you want, you can create an audio ecosystem that scales to meet the room’s needs.

Large Conference Room

Large conference rooms can seat over 16+ people comfortably and typically have a large amount of open space. This empty space can cause issues for both audio and visual setups.

On the visual side, empty space means a lot of room for the camera to cover for remote viewers and a greater distance between on-site participants and displays. This can be solved with multiple or larger displays and more advanced cameras that can swivel and zoom on speakers.

For audio solutions, empty space means reduced audio quality due to reverberation and echo. Typical DIY solutions don’t allow for fine-tuning their devices for the acoustic properties of a space, which severely limits the options available when designing your room. 

The Stem Ecosystem solves this in two ways. First, you can design your space before you buy and get a more complete picture of what devices you need to provide coverage for the usable space. Secondly, you can utilize up to ten devices per room, which allows you to set up coverage for any seating configuration and limit the amount of dead space around the device.

U-shaped Conference Room

U-shaped conferencing tables sacrifice a large amount of surface area and seating to bring focus to one side of the table and provide better visibility of other participants. This layout is perfect for presentations, video conferencing, and discussions or debates where participants can clearly see one another while talking.

Video solutions can vary depending on the situation – if there is an in-person presentation, having a display, and a camera that faces the presenter would be beneficial so that remote viewers can participate as if they are in the room. For meetings, a display and camera that faces the opening of the U would be more effective. With the versatility of this type of setup, you could even have a camera and display for each side of the room that could be used when needed.

Training and Classrooms

With the flexibility video conferencing gives teachers and instructors, it’s looking more and more like hybrid classrooms are the way of the future. This presents a unique challenge for the IT professionals that need to turn a ton of rooms designed for in-person learning into the perfect hyflex classrooms with video conferencing capabilities.

Video solutions are highly dependent on the size of the classroom. For small- to medium-sized classrooms, cameras and displays can be placed at the back of the class, so remote participants can observe the teacher and be observed. For larger spaces like lecture halls, the camera may need to be close to the presentation space and you can pretty much do away with the displays.

The audio solution plays a more important part in distance learning. Not only should remote participants be able to hear the teacher, but they should also be able to hear other students asking questions and creating discussions during the lesson. By using Stem’s RoomDesign tool, you can virtually design your room, drop-in products, and even show estimated coverage ranges before you purchase so you can make sure every voice is heard.

Have a conferencing space that you need help designing? Use the Stem RoomDesign tool to digitally recreate your room and create an audio device mix that meets your needs!