This was a collaboration between the client, Arup Venue Consultants and Video South Medical Television.

The brief for the software ...

Bring multi screen presentation, video conferencing, AV playback and theatre style stage lighting under the control of a novice user.

The theatre was to be used by so many different groups - it was decided to allow the technician to record any lighting look into a preset, and then to associate a sub set of these presets into a 'room mode' setup.

Some medical user groups require total blackout when viewing slides, whereas others like to have enough light to see each other and so on.

This was achieved using deceptively simple user screens, and comprehensive preset configurations under control of the in house AV technician.

This has proved flexible enough to allow the lecture theatre to be used for drama productions.

Integration features included the ability to focus a camera on any given seat in the theatre on command from the audience participation system. The press to talk button on a delegates handset causes a seat number to be sent to the control system. This is mapped to a camera ID and Pan, Tilt and Zoom data. This allows the relevant camera to be instantly focussed on the questioner, with their image displayed on auxiliary screens.

As well as full automation, the system allows the technician to take over at any point in a session with a panel mimicking the user's panel. The technician also has detailed control pages for every aspect of the system through a large high resolution panel.

The user screen allows intuitive use of the Tandberg video conference system, while the technician is also able to set up video conferencing calls and pass them over to the theatre on cue.

The system has been working for over two years, without a single software related call out. Diagnostic routines run regularly to detect hardware problems as soon as they occur.

Other interesting features include a completely configurable routing system. The theatre has a large multi level matrix. To avoid endless rework and post installation call outs, the software module controlling routing is initialized at boot time from a text file. This file has information on which devices are attached to matrix ports, along with button names to be used for the technician's router control pages.

This file also contains routing information, so that all the signal routes throughout the system are adjustable with no need for recompilation.