"The whole experience is contained in our four showcase rooms, where our pitch work and presentations take place," said Group IT manager, Darren Watts. "The need for a new infrastructure was driven by our senior management." At the same time, he said, in order to impress clients, ease of use of any new system was of paramount importance."
A Plus Services were awarded the contract largely on the strength of work their project manager Martin Cowling had undertaken previously on the third floor of the building for one of the incumbent companies. "I decided that if the engineering and services side measured up, then A Plus Services could do all four of our presentation suites," said Watts.
But with the two principle boardrooms both overlooking the Thames through great picture windows, both screens and projectors would need to be selected for optimum gain. Furthermore, both rooms were interconnectable (via a concertina partition) with the doors not only opening into a larger auditorium, but also onto a terrace for social use.
A Plus Services demonstrated a number of screen options to various senior WWAV Rapp Collins staff members and the decision came down in favour of dnp's Supernova.
Cowling says: "We fitted the Supernovas and did the training right in the middle of this year's fierce summer sun. We tested it with Toy Story on DVD and although we dropped the blinds a fraction there was no need to plunge the room into darkness because the picture was so good." With so much glass A Plus Services needed to choose a display that offered extra gain. "You would have seen nothing in all that daylight had we used a 2,500 ANSI lumen projector onto an electric screen."
The company also had to implement a rolling programme, working around room availability, which made scheduling difficult.
For the two main boardrooms they selected the reliability of Christie LX55 5500-lumen XGA LCD devices, front-projecting onto 72in optical Supernova displays. Available in 4:3 and 16:9 formats they deliver up to ten times higher contrast than normal screens by rejecting wavelengths that arrive from off-axis angles.
The other two interconnecting meeting rooms are denoted Westminster 1 and 2, and while the latter is again front-projected from a Christie LX50 onto a 72in Supernova, there was sufficient space in Westminster 1 to allow A Plus Services to design a rearpro solution, using a twin mirror rig from Paradigm AV (the UK distributors for dnp) customised to fit. This enables the beam from a Christie LX35 to be folded onto an 84in Supernova - to amazing effect
Cowling says: "Although the 3,500 lumen projector offered us slightly reduced power this was a darker room, and in rear projection format we knew that quality wise it would be the best."The criteria for simple operation was met by programming a Crestron touch screen system, operable by TPS4L Compact wall-mount touch panels in each room.
The flexibility of the design has been carefully considered - with provision for laptop and host PC inputs, plus equipment housed in a credenza, containing the processor, amplifier, VCR/DVD combo etc. With no mics the system is configured for line level feeds and thus the Christies take direct XGA and composite inputs in native resolution.
Watts, who uses Room Viewer software to monitor changing room configurations, says the installation has been not only popular but also effective, as the agency adds to its portfolio of blue chip clients.
Moreover, it has given WWAV the confidence to consider its next phase of development - by merging their Albert and Vauxhall rooms, replacing the partition wall with a one-way mirror to form a Market Research Room. "We will put in video recording
