University of Sydney Charles Perkins Centre X-Lab

CHALLENGE

The Charles Perkins Centre is a new medical research and education facility at the University of Sydney, Australia. The X-lab is the building’s high-tech 240-seat teaching laboratory where students from a variety of medical disciplines put theory into practice. Eight teaching stations at the front of the room send up to three streams of HD video to student laboratory benches within the 40-me ter long space. In a “live” laboratory where the nearest student laboratory bench 1.5 metres away could be listening to a different class, thorough and thoughtful audio design was critical to meeting this c hallenge - a challenge that the design team has met brilliantly.

SOLUTION

The flexibility and power of AMX control is at the heart of this success story. Our teachers are specialists in their field, not AV technicians, and the touch panel interface had to present an elegant, simple and graphical way for them to control the huge complexity that was required to deliver the dynamically assignable video streams and distributed audio solution. Teachers simply click the benches they want to send to on the touch panels’ graphical plans of the laboratory, click the sources they want to send such as microscope camera, visualizer or PC, and the AMX control system ensures that the audio and video gets to where it needs to go. A world-class, ultra-directional speaker technology completes the “X” factor for this groundbreaking teaching lab. The Panphonics speakers saved the day and enabled the brief of a headphoneless solution to be achieved. The narrowness of their focused audio beam is truly amazing and are a cause of wonder to first time visitors, but more importantly, they made it possible to deliver the required educational outcome when many thought it impossible to achieve. Finally, the wonderful compact retractable AMX HydraPort systems saved us from a very sticky situation. The prospect of AV cables dangling into organ baths with body parts was not a pretty one. The compact nature of the HydraPports retractable cable system allowed us to fit the right cable management solution into the very tight space of the service bollard and saved the day.

IMPACT

"The scheduling flexibility of the X-Lab solves that problem for the University and brings different disciplines together for collaboration and a productive interchange of ideas. The X-Lab concept depends on AV to be viable. It would simply be impossible to teach there without the flexible and modern AV/IT solutions that the hardworking designers, installers and vendors have provided."

– Jason Wheatley, Manager, Interactive Learning Service