A dedicated control room holds the audio and video switching equipment and Tandberg coder/decoders to connect the amphitheater to other telemedicine locations. The T-Health Institute's equipment is compatible with all standards-based equipment at other videoconferencing sites, Mauger says.
The amphitheater has 17 student desks with individual videocameras, microphones and headphones. There's also a free-standing Wharton Lectern with a Crestron control panel, which facilitators can use to control how participants are grouped on the video wall. Personal voice channels are clustered based on how the participants are grouped on the wall.
Although Weinstein was able to articulate this vision of interprofessional interaction -- that is, he could clearly lay out the user requirements -- implementing the technology to support it brought challenges, IT workers say.
Mauger says creating a videoconferencing system that linked multiple sites in one video wall wasn't the challenging part. The real challenge was developing the technology that allows facilitators to move participants into separate virtual groups and then seamlessly switch them around.
"The biggest challenges to making this work were the audio isolation among the separate conference participants as well as fast dynamics of switching video and moving participants to meetings," he explains.
To address those issues, Mauger says he customized the control system, a set of hardware and software tools from Crestron Electronics Inc. He also customized hardware from Extron Electronics, a maker of professional audiovisual systems integration products.
Mauger uses MediaMatrix from Peavey Electronics for audio processing.
"All this work took a couple of iterations, and we're still fine-tuning it," says Leela Doppalapudi, an ATP senior systems programmer and project manager for Phase 2 of the T-Health initiative.
Project leaders credited the team for having the expertise to get those components online. "It took all of our experience in videoconferencing to bring it all together and make it work," says Holcomb.