Picture this: you are headed back into the office to connect with your teammates in person, but many of your teammates were unable to join you. You check into a conference room with a few in-person colleagues to join a call with your entire hybrid team. You speak up to contribute to the conversation, but your remote teammates can hardly tell who is talking with the typical fish-eye group view of your conference room, making them feel isolated and causing frustration for those in the room.

On the other side of the call, your remote colleagues have a hard time identifying who is in the room and because they don’t know whose name to call, they avoid prompting the conference room participants to join in the conversation.

Whatever side you end up on, it’s not an ideal experience.

As part of our ongoing mission to bring equality to everyone who joins a meeting, Poly is proud to announce our latest Poly DirectorAI smart camera technology: people framing mode. By creating zoomed-in tiles for every individual in the room, people framing mode solves these hybrid meeting challenges by making sure that everyone has a seat at the virtual table.

What is People Framing Mode?

As the newest framing mode within Poly DirectorAI’s suite of features, people framing sits alongside other modes including group framing and speaker framing, providing Poly users with another layer of flexibility to customize meetings to their preferences.

People framing is similar to our flagship framing modes in some ways and unique in others. Like other framing modes on Poly devices, people framing places the focus on certain elements of the meeting—in this case, all participants. After identifying participants, the camera combines several different zoomed-in shots of the room to create a unique layout of frames, showing all in-person participants with an up-close view. This layout of frames is then sent to the video app of your choice as a single video stream so that far-end viewers can easily connect with in-person participants.

And it’s as easy as that! The magic happens in the camera, which means that you can use people framing mode with any app that your Poly video device works with. This flexible deployment makes achieving meeting equality much more accessible, no matter what your preferred platform is.

Take Your Meetings Up a Notch

People framing mode will be available first on the Poly Studio X70 video bar and Poly Studio E70 camera later this quarter. To turn people framing mode on, you can utilize Poly Lens or the system’s web interface, depending on the device. Some video apps compatible with Studio X70 will even allow you to change camera modes through their interface.

Poly DirectorAI’s people framing mode is our next step towards the future of hybrid meetings. It’s a stride toward a world where remote and in-person employees feel that they have equal chances to speak, to be seen, and to succeed. And it’s another element that will go into creating hybrid meetings that are exciting, productive and feel like the new normal.

For more information on Poly DirectorAI’s newest framing mode reach out to the Poly team today or visit Poly.com!

As part of our mission to support hybrid workers and take steps towards meeting equality, Poly continues to develop solutions for every workstyle and situation, which leads us to the introduction of our newest USB video bar for small rooms: Poly Studio R30.  

Certified for Zoom and with Microsoft Teams certification pending, Poly Studio R30 shares many of the same functionalities and features found on other Poly video bars but is optimized for small room performance at a small room price. At an MSRP of $799, this USB video bar packs quite the punch with a built-in speaker, 4k camera with a 120-degree field-of-view, 3-element beam-forming microphone array, and Poly DirectorAI smart camera technology. 

With Poly Studio R30, we strategically chose the most important group video elements from our larger group devices and combined them with some user-friendly attributes of our personal devices, like USB connectivity and a removable monitor clamp, to create a device that is thoughtfully optimized for small meeting rooms.  

We’ve doubled down on elements of the videoconferencing experience that are crucial for hybrid meetings. Poly DirectorAI technology is the brain behind our cameras, delivering features like group framing, speaker framing and presenter tracking. It’s like your meeting room director whose job is to make sure that everyone is seen clearly and has an equitable seat at the table. 

We accomplish this by thoughtfully crafting a set of production rules, inspired by TV and movies, using machine learning and AI to automate those rules based on the dynamics of your meeting. The magic all happens in the camera; it uses facial recognition algorithms and voice triangulation to identify the nuances of your meeting and then create the best frame based on those nuances as well as your preferences.  

No meeting is the same, and that’s why Poly Studio R30 provides you with the flexibility to use the best framing mode for your unique situation. Scaling down to a small room price also means that this experience is more accessible than ever before.  

With the introduction of Poly Studio R30, we continue to build out our strong portfolio of certified USB video bars with a dedicated solution for every size room.

• Poly Studio P15 is optimized for your home office or in a personal space at the office such as a focus room.  

• Poly Studio R30 has got your small conference rooms covered for all its USB video bar needs.  

• Poly Studio USB is ideal for those mid-sized rooms that are a bit too big for Poly Studio R30.  With stereo speakers, impressive camera performance, and the option to add an expansion mic, Poly Studio makes the perfect device for those “in-between” rooms.  

Our portfolio of USB video bars, including the newly introduced Poly Studio R30, provides an accessible and professional video conferencing option for meeting rooms of every size. Regardless of what company you work for, what industry you are in, and where your work is getting done, Poly’s collaboration solutions ensure you an equal seat at the virtual meeting table. 

To learn more about the Poly Studio R30, visit Poly.com 

Focus room popularity was on the rise in pre-covid times before video conferencing became the universal norm. However, we are now faced with the same problems that focus rooms stood to solve pre-pandemic, but the implementation of hybrid working has added a new layer of complexity to this solution; and doubled, if not tripled its importance. To understand the nuances of the focus room solution today, it is important to first look at the evolution of workspace optimization.  

According to Wainhouse Research, “small rooms account for the largest percentage of conference rooms in the workplace and will see the highest increase in unit count over the foreseeable future. We expect ultra-small rooms for one or two people (also known as focus rooms, touchdown rooms, or telephone booth rooms) to account for most of this growth as they are an ideal workplace solution for the growing acceptance of hybrid work.” 

Evolution of the Workspace 

TRADITIONAL CUBICLES 

The traditional corporate cubicle was designed in the 1960s as a solution to the original open workspace plan that was commonplace in the early 1900s. Some characteristics of this office style were: 

• Employees had a decent amount of privacy within their cubicles 
• Much quieter than an open workspace 
• A bit isolating after poor implementation by many companies; cubicles became associated with sunlight-less days and being stuck in a sea of grey 
• No real need for designated focus rooms since personal cubicles served as a space for focus and privacy 

OPEN WORKSPACE 

The original open workspace concept predates the era of cubicles, but in recent years, it has made a highly contested return. Pre-pandemic, “hip” tech companies seemed to be moving to open workspaces in mass as a way to disrupt the perceived “stuffiness” of closed workspaces. Characteristics of open workspaces in the late 2010s were:  

• Modern, “hip” design elements that bring the space to life 
• Noisy, busy, often difficult to focus
• More conducive to collaboration and impromptu team communication 

So, hip or not, it has become clear focus rooms became a crucial part of open workspace success. Companies that can provide an adequate amount of focus spaces are able to reap the benefits of both workspace styles.  

Hybrid Work & Focus Rooms 

The reality is that there is no “right” way to work. Some are most successful working without the office altogether, some from the open office, some from a private workspace, and some feel that they can optimize their productivity with the option to do all. This has led to the birth of “hybrid work”. While the definition of “hybrid-work” varies from organization to organization, there are some common characteristics. 

•  Companies have a mixture of full-time remote, part-time remote, and full-time onsite employees left up to the discretion of the individual employee 

• Companies are expecting fewer people in the office at once, and therefore downsizing space and moving away from individual cubicles/closed offices (if they had not already)  

• Open workspace will remain the norm, but many offices are implementing hoteling style open workspaces, where employees reserve desks ad hoc for days that they are going in the office 

Taking this into consideration, the need for a focus room has never been greater. Focus rooms provide a space for employees to take private video calls, and as we all know, the amount of video calls in our workdays has risen significantly.  

Focus Rooms Play a Role in Meeting Equality 

Successful, long-term implementation of hybrid work also requires that companies strive to achieve meeting equality. Unequal experiences of remote and in-office employees played a huge role in why many companies (and employees too) felt that they could not fully commit to remote work pre-pandemic until they didn’t have a choice. It seems that if we are not able to give equal experiences to remote and in-office employees under hybrid work models, we will continue to see the same friction with remote work that we saw pre-pandemic.  

Poly is focused on building solutions to help hybrid companies achieve meeting equality, which is why we have created plug-and-play focus room devices like the Studio P15, with advanced AI that places the focus on the speaker so that everyone, including remote meeting attendees, has a clear view of what is going on.  

With the quickly changing workspace landscape, all signs point to the need for personal workspace rooms. It is the focus room’s time to shine.