THE EPOS MEETING ROOM GUIDE
Room Acoustics
The first and perhaps most important aspect to consider is acoustics. Meeting rooms are built to enable meaningful dialogue, which is why it’s critical to ensure that their acoustic properties facilitate this.
BEST PRACTICE
Floor: Use floor carpeting or other soft materials that are good at absorbing sound and dampen furniture noises.
Ceiling: Select special acoustic tiles or hanging panels for the ceiling in order to reduce room reverberance.
Walls: Consider placing acoustic absorption on the walls. Ideally, at least two adjacent walls should have panels made of an acoustic absorbent material.
WHAT TO AVOID
Surfaces that reflect sound, which may compromise audio quality. This means not using hard materials like stone, glass, metal, and so on.
Hardwood flooring or tiles, for the same reason.
Lighting
Meeting spaces — especially ones built for video calls will also need to consider the lighting sources and placement.
BEST PRACTICE
Install flexible ways to control in-room lighting on demand, such as blinds or curtains.
Use “neutral white” LED lighting (4000 to 5000 Kelvin).
WHAT TO AVOID
Powerful and focused sources of light (such as spotlights) placed behind meeting participants. This makes the participant harder to see, especially on the video feed for remote colleagues.
Room Colors
While vividly colorful rooms may be great from a design perspective, they risk being a source of distraction and distortion for video calls.
BEST PRACTICE
Stick to neutral colors like beige and gray to help attendees concentrate on the meeting.
Use any bright branding elements in moderation, ideally out of the video camera’s field of view.
WHAT TO AVOID
Any bright primary colors (red, blue, green, and yellow). These can negatively affect how in-room participants appear on the video feed.
Visually distracting wall decorations or patterns.
Furniture
Furniture plays an important role in facilitating conversations and ensuring that remote attendees can interact with in-room participants.
BEST PRACTICE
Arrange tables in a semicircle, with the widest part closest to the camera—this ensures everyone in the room is visible. For medium and large rooms, a conical table is the preferred option.
Invest in lightweight and portable chairs that can be freely moved to accommodate different types of meetings.
WHAT TO AVOID
Setting up seating outside of the camera’s field of view.
Placing the table front closer than 0.7 times its width to the camera.
Other Considerations
Here are a few general guidelines to designing an effective video meeting space.
BEST PRACTICE
Tuck wires away below the tables or use purpose-built cable concealers.
Allow for confidential meetings by equipping the room with blinds, curtains, frosted glass, or a dedicated privacy screen.
WHAT TO AVOID
Visual clutter and distracting elements in the meeting room.
Unnecessary furniture or decorations that can serve as a source of distraction for meeting participants.
Camera
The conference room camera must be able to capture everyone in the room.
SOME CONSIDERATIONS
Keep the camera at participants’ eye level, pointed at the center of the room. Place it right above or below the screen, if possible.
If the camera must be placed above or below eye level, pick a camera that can be adjusted for pan, tilt, and viewing angle.
When placing the camera / video bar under the screen, the ideal placement is 115–120 centimeters (45–47 inches) from the floor to the camera lens.
When placing the camera / video bar above the screen, keep it below 180 centimeters (71 inches) from the floor to avoid the bird’s-eye view.
Select a camera with the right field of view (FOV) that can capture the entire room and its participants.
Simplify the setup process with a compact, all-in-one conference camera with built-in speakers, like EPOS EXPAND Vision 5.
Display
Picking the right screen and positioning it appropriately is critical to ensuring effective remote meetings.
Number of displays: If possible, it will be an advantage to set up two separate screens — one for shared content and one for the video feed from remote attendees. For focus rooms and smaller meeting rooms, a single display is usually sufficient.
Display size: This depends largely on the size of the room. As a rule of thumb, the furthest seated participant should be easily able to see fine details like text. The recommended viewing distance is between one and four times the diagonal length of the monitor.
Display placement: Mount the monitor around the eye level of seated participants. This is typically between 116-127 centimeters (46–50 inches) from the floor but will largely depend on the camera placement.
Display settings: Ensure the lowest possible latency to facilitate real-time communication (if there’s a “Game” or “PC” mode on the monitor, enable it). Screen resolution, brightness, contrast, and color saturation should be set to provide the most natural appearance of remote attendees.
