Long Beach City College has opened a new esports facility on its Liberal Arts Campus, featuring Extron AV control technology and NAV Pro AV over IP for switching and distributing gaming content.
The new gaming floor includes 47 Alienware gaming stations for players. Coaches monitor and advise players from five mobile stations that connect to the network via Extron connection boxes at the end of each team table. The facility also features a shoutcaster booth, seating two staff members, equipped with twin 65-inch flat panel displays for production and announcing.
The project was designed and built by HPI Architecture, P2S Engineering and EKC Enterprises, Inc., with assistance from Extron and supervision by LBCC’s Multimedia Technologies staff. It replaces the college’s previous gaming space, which was located at a nearby high school.
“Extron’s AV control system design for the esports facility met our requirement to keep things intuitive for users,” said Chris Greenwood, project manager for educational and multimedia technologies at Long Beach City College. “The TouchLink Pro touchpanel GUIs show clickable room maps of gaming stations and video displays, which makes assigning gaming stations to teams, creating competition matchups, and arranging multiple video windows on room displays very natural for users while the control system and the NAV Pro AV over IP network handle switching and transmission behind the scenes.”
The facility uses NAV Pro AV over IP to support a large number of AV endpoints, with the ability to add more by connecting additional encoders and decoders to the network. The system’s ultra-low latency transmission over 1 Gbps Ethernet is designed to support the fast reaction times critical during competitions.
NAV encoders connect gaming PCs, PTZ cameras and other AV sources to the network. NAV scaling decoders deliver content to displays around the facility in 4K resolution and enable streaming to platforms such as Twitch and YouTube via OBS Studio. MGP 641 xi multi-window processors allow the production team to create split-screen presentations of up to eight sources on any display.