Since the launch of the first Meeting Owls, we’ve developed an entire line of connected products and room solutions specifically for hybrid team collaboration. With setups like a center-of-table video conferencing camera, hybrid work concerns disappear as the employee experience is far better than crowding around a laptop to include remote teammates. Now, the Meeting Owl 3, Expansion Mic, and other new features create even more possibilities for hybrid collaboration.
The Meeting Owl is an easy-to-install plug and play video conferencing camera and microphone. It’s an adaptable system that can work in many different setups and scenarios, and if something changes, it’s easy to move and set up again. The Meeting Owl camera view shows an optional 360° panoramic display of the room as well as a face-to-face view that auto-focuses on whoever is speaking, so remote attendees feel like they’re in the room, too.
Owl Labs updates our product suite with software releases regularly. Customers are constantly sharing ideas and feedback to the Owl Labs R&D team that help us develop features and tools to make meetings easier and more connected than ever.
Enter: The Meeting Owl 3. It has a 75% improvement in the percentage of the stage dedicated to faces, and the default video pickup range has increased from 8’ to 10’. The Owl Intelligence System (OIS) is now four times faster at recognizing faces and focusing on people as they’re speaking. And now, the display shows 98% faces, up from 92%, since true collaboration is about connecting with coworkers while they’re speaking.
And because of the challenges of the pandemic, the Meeting Owl 3 evolved to better recognize and hear masked meeting attendees.
Best of all, the new Expansion Mic is helpful for increasing a meeting room’s audio pickup capabilities, helping the platform pick up quiet voices. It’s one of the many ways to improve equity in the workplace: if everyone at every meeting knows they will truly be heard by all participants, they’ll feel more confident that it’s worth speaking up and sharing their ideas.
“Our new products empower meeting space designers to outfit any space for inclusive meeting experiences,” shared Max Makeev, Founder of Owl Labs.
Meeting Owl 3 setups + best practices
The way that you set up your conference rooms or meeting rooms can impact the effectiveness of the conversation, and the experience of everyone in and out of the room. Make sure to equip every meeting space with outlets, a monitor, seating, a table or desk, and WiFi — at a minimum. Regularly ask your employees how their meeting experiences are, then make improvements to adapt to their changing needs.
Here are some of the best ways to set up the Meeting Owl 3 and Expansion Mic for different collaborative workplace activities.
Setup 1: Collaborative experience setup
In a room with a table, chairs, and a large monitor, place the Meeting Owl 3 at the center of the table in the room. Everyone within a 10-foot radius around the Meeting Owl 3 will be picked up on video, and the system will focus on whoever’s speaking. And everyone within an 18-foot radius around the Meeting Owl 3 will be able to be clearly heard.
“The Meeting Owl 3 makes it easy and engaging to collaborate from multiple locations,” says Ashley Kerr, VP of Marketing at Owl Labs.
Setup 2: Extended audio setup
Place the Meeting Owl 3 on the table, about a third of the table’s length away from the monitor. Then, connect the Expansion Mic to the Meeting Owl 3 and place it an additional third down the table. It adds an additional 8-foot radius to the audio range, ensuring that everyone within 26 feet will be clearly heard by their remote collaborators.
The Expansion Mic also brings the mute feature closer to team members who are seated farther away, making for a more seamless experience when someone on the virtual side is speaking.
This is the ideal setup for medium to large conference rooms.
Setup 3: Premium immersive setup
In a meeting room with a monitor and an extra long table, two Meeting Owls can be placed on the table and connected using Owl Connect to capture an audio range of 44’ and a video range of 28’. This is the ideal setup for large brainstorms with whole teams in larger conference rooms.
Meeting Owl 3 + Expansion Mics = Your best hybrid meetings ever
Compatible with every major video conferencing system, the Meeting Owl 3 is ready to make your hybrid meetings go smoother than ever. No need to awkwardly set up a Zoom while online participants wait to be added, and no need to delay brainstorming and lose great ideas to audio lag and video issues. Alongside our new hardware releases, we recently released a series of Owl Labs updates that makes our products smarter and safer over time.
Make sure everyone, in every meeting, can be seen and heard with the Meeting Owl 3 plus Expansion Mics.
