Use Our Floor-space Calculator to see how much space you can save with the right camera!

How to use the interactive calculator:

• 1. Select your preferred units in the top right of the graphic
• 2. Enter the current rent and rates cost of your office space in the Rent Cost box (don’t worry about which currency – what you put in, you’ll get out)
• 3. Enter the number of video rooms you’re planning
• 4. Drag the slider from left to right and see how much space and rent you can save as the camera’s field-of-view gets wider!

Why is this Important?

When an AV designer sits down to create a video conferencing room from scratch, the first things she or he will need to know is 1) how many seats at the table and 2) the field (or angle) of view of the room camera.

Why? Because the table size is set by the number of chairs round the table (plus the minimum space around them) and is pretty much a fixed standard, while the field-of-view (FOV) of the camera will set the minimum distance between the display/camera and the nearest participant’s chair at the table. So, together, these two parameters will determine the minimum size of the room.

In the graphic below, you can see why the FOV of the camera needs to be considered.  A standard pan, tilt, zoom (PTZ) camera might have an FOV of 72° so, in our example, the nearest table edge will need to be set 1.2 meters from the camera/display to ensure that the nearest participants are in shot when the camera zoom is set at its widest.

In the example above, this camera-to-table distance leads to an area of dead space of 3.75 m² or about 40 square feet.  How much are you paying in rent and rates for your for floor-space?  If you’re in the City of London, that number would be about £83 per sq.ft. or around £3,320 per room per year in wasted rent.  More to the point, if you’re deploying a number of rooms, in the space needed for three rooms using the legacy PTZ camera, you could accommodate four rooms based on the PanaCast improving room availability, the user experience and floor space efficiency.

Now it follows that, if the camera has a wider FOV, this distance can be reduced but there’s a problem.  As you increase the camera’s FOV, you introduce picture distortion commonly called the “fisheye” effect.  Verticals and horizontals start to bow (barrel distortion) and the apparent size of the objects and people in the shot will vary considerably depending on where in the field of view they are sitting. They will appear taller (and more distorted) at the extremes and shorter towards the middle. The results are unusable in a professional video meeting.

This can be corrected by the use of very complex lens systems but these kind of lenses are far too expensive for a camera that will cost less that £1,000. So what to do?

Altia Systems took a different approach with their PanaCast intelligent camera system.  They gave the camera three in-line sensors each with a much more modest FOV and stitched the three video streams together in the camera to form one, low distortion, 4K (UHD) video image.

In fact, allowing for a little overlap in the three fields, the PanaCast camera provides a horizontal coverage of 180° which means that camera-to-table distance can be reduced to zero while still ensuring that everyone at the table is always in shot.

The result is a natural-looking wide-angle view in crisp 4K resolution with everyone and everything of importance in the room clearly visible