The need is increasing for more useful communication tools that enable people and organisations to interact more successfully with remote colleagues, clients, suppliers and partners. This is driving the growth of a new kind of video conferencing in the workplace called visual collaboration.
A major challenge is making sure that everyone and everything that matter to the meeting or presentation is ‘in view’ and visible. This applies to a small meeting room with participants close to the display or a large room set out in the classroom format and demands a camera with a field-of-view (FOV) much wider than standard conferencing solutions.
A typical Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) camera has an FOV of just 60°- 90° so not all participants will be visible if the PTZ remains fixed in one position. This leads to the need for one person to ‘direct’ the camera throughout the meeting to make sure that the current speaker or the whiteboard is in view. And, of course, no one wants to do this, so the camera remains static in one position and the experience at the far end of the room is less than ideal.
But creating a wide angle camera that delivers a pin-sharp image across the whole field of view without the spacial and radial distortion typical of fisheye lenses is impossible to achieve with a single, affordable lens. The PanaCast overcomes this by using three miniaturised cameras, each with a more modest FOV of ~80° and then stitches the three streams together on-the-fly in the camera to deliver an unequaled, single, 4K (UHD) resolution image.
After 20 years, the PanaCast 2 camera, at last, removes the dominance of the legacy PTZ camera and, for the first time, offers a full 180 degrees view of the room, its occupants and whiteboard surfaces – all without the need for any intervention by the participants.
“The actual image captured by the camera when we tried it in a lecture theatre (300+ seat) was perfect. Every seat in the frame handled the lighting conditions well, good focus, seamlessly stitched. Very impressed.”
“We chose the PanaCast 2 video camera because it gives an immersive sense of participation to remote meeting participants. With PanaCast 2, there is no need to squeeze together to get into the scene or waste time panning and zooming like with a typical conference room camera.”
“The panoramic view allowed me to see all five remote participants at the same time, and the 4k resolution provided great visual detail – allowing me to feel ‘connected’ to everyone in the meeting.”
Why Shane Morley, IT Manager, of Turnitin bought The PanaCast 2 Vidoe Camera for his Zoom meeting rooms
“We recently installed several of the PanaCast 2 panoramic cameras in our Zoom meeting rooms. Prior to that, we’d been using an industry-leading PTZ-based conference kit but the camera just couldn’t cover everyone in the small rooms we’re using so we looked for a better solution and the 180 ° PanaCast solved the problem.
One big thing we noticed was how easy the PanaCast was to install. The old, heavy PTZ kit took most of a day due mostly to the challenge of mounting the camera. As we couldn’t invert it, we ended up having to engineer our own camera bracket! The PanaCast, being smaller, lighter and able to be inverted, cut installation time to just two hours and resulted in a much neater install”
Steve Mills, Managing Director, The Prudent Marketer
“I use his fantastic PanaCast camera for my online meetings with all my clients. The Camera is truly OUTSTANDING. It enables us to save time and money and at the same time, we can run professional meetings in our office. Our travelling time and cost have been reduced by about 80%.
If you run web-based meetings, then I strongly recommend that you take a look at the Panacast Solution, plus Doug is a really nice guy too and full of great advice regarding his products and how you can use them to improve the quality of your online meetings.
"More than 2500 organisations in 38+ countries are using the PanaCast daily to improve their communication and productivity.
Over 200 universities are now adopting the PanaCast for lecture capture and huddle room deployments."
“(PanaCast 2) is a very different form factor than the usual 1080p camera that we are using elsewhere in the lab. You can see it has no seams and it’s a very good picture quality.”
Robert
ScobleFuturist / Rackspace
“PanaCast…actually seems like something that would be both fun and exceedingly useful.”
Michael
SeoWriter / TechCrunch
“The actual image captured by the camera when we tried it in a lecture theatre (300+ seat) was perfect. Every seat in the frame, handled the lighting conditions well, good focus, seamlessly stitched. Very impressed.”
Geoff Lambert
Sr. Project Manager of IT & Digital Services / University of Western Sydney
“… a great improvement over standard video chat experiences.” Read article
Michael Gorman
Editor-in-Chief / Engadget
“The panoramic view allowed me to see all five remote participants at the same time, and the 4k resolution provided great visual detail – allowing me to feel ‘connected’ to everyone in the meeting.”
What Ira M. Weinstein thinks about the PanaCast 2
Senior Analyst & Partner / Wainhouse Research
“We chose the PanaCast 2 video camera because it gives an immersive sense of participation to remote meeting participants. With PanaCast 2, there is no need to squeeze together to get into the scene or waste time panning and zooming like with a typical conference room camera.”
Jolean De KortJolean De Kort
Director Employee Technology / GoDaddy
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