Owl Labs debuts the Meeting Owl, the most engaging plug-and-play video conferencing product for collaborative teams.

Optimized with a 360° camera and intelligent focus, it automatically identifies and highlights active speakers in the room. With a consumer-style design, the Meeting Owl gives remote meeting participants a heightened level of awareness and visual understanding so they can drive better business outcomes.Curious? See it for yourself.

"For years, the collaboration industry was in a plumbing phase, focused more on ensuring that calls connected reliably than on providing an optimal user experience," explained Ira M. Weinstein, Senior Analyst and Partner at Wainhouse Research and co-author of Adding Collaboration to the Huddle Room. "The Meeting Owl, however, is all about the user experience, and ensuring that all local participants are captured on camera, and that remote participants feel more 'connected' to the rest of the people in the meeting."

What makes the Meeting Owl unique is the remote participant's inclusive experience and view. Body language and facial responses of those in the room are captured with intelligent focus on one, two or three active speakers at the same time in addition to the panoramic view of the entire room. Because everyone feels like they are sitting at the table, the whole team is set up for success.

Key features and benefits of the Meeting Owl include:

• Engaging "face-to-face" experience – The Meeting Owl employs a single 360° lens to create a panoramic view of the room without video stitching. The intelligent speaker focus simultaneously highlights individuals and the interaction throughout the room. Remote participants no longer feel like a fly-on-the-wall, as they often do when using existing video conferencing solutions.
• Easy to use, all-in-one audio and video device – The approximately 11-inch tall Meeting Owl encapsulates the 360° camera, microphones and speakers into a single USB plug-and-play device. The approachable design is simple to set up and seamlessly integrates with popular web-enabled video conferencing providers, including Zoom, Slack, Google Hangouts, BlueJeans and Skype for Business.
• Smart technology to please every user – The Wi-Fi enabled IoT device is designed to intelligently improve over time. It automatically updates and syncs new features in the background to enhance the remote experience. For the power user, the Meeting Owl app provides various capabilities, including manual control of the camera to focus on a particular area of the room.

"The Meeting Owl is the best immersive conferencing tool we've seen," said Greg Raiz, CEO and Cofounder of Raizlabs and an original beta user of the product. "When one of our senior software engineers moved across the country, meetings became incredibly ineffective. He couldn't see or hear the conversation. We chose the Meeting Owl to fix this problem, and in his words it immediately gave him a sense of being in the room. Now conversations are much more natural. The Meeting Owl improved our cross-coastal communications and brought us a significant step closer to the face-to-face experience."

The Meeting Owl is available for purchase today for $799. Order online at www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl.

About Owl Labs

Owl Labs is a video conferencing hardware company creating a new IoT product for the conference room that puts the remote employee's experience first. With more and more people going remote, teams need better technology to meet and stay connected to their distributed teammates. Owl Labs' products will set a new standard for the remote meeting experience. Learn more about the company at www.owllabs.com.