The new 145,000 square-foot Allied Health Veterans Hall at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW) features a variety of AV systems that are carefully tailored for each unique space. The building houses UNCW’s first instructional spaces designed from the ground up as active learning classrooms. It also houses state-of-the-art health labs, problem-based learning rooms and a variety of spaces for collaboration. Consultant Affiliated Engineers, Inc. designed the comprehensive installation, and KONTEK Systems, Inc. provided integration. Each room includes its own flexible DTP presentation system with a variety of additional Extron audio and control products. For centralized management and lesson capture, the AV systems are tied into the Distance Education (DE) control room over an Extron NAV Pro AV over IP enterprise network system.

UNCW chose the NAV design to tether the rooms together for many reasons. Testing proved that NAV was stable, robust and delivered a visually lossless signal. The system was easy for the support staff to administer from the DE control room, and all control system programming could be performed in-house. NAV also provides the capability to control or limit bandwidth if necessary.

“Tying the cameras and mics to each room’s local system and the Distance Education control room has proven to be a major benefit in this age of Covid,” says Robb Mann, CTS-I, Manager, Integrated Educational Technologies, ITS at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. “We use the NAV AVoIP system to route lessons anywhere, as well as capture each session, which satisfies all of our social distancing needs and has huge positive implications for the future.”

Extron NAV E 101 1G encoders and NAV SD 101 1G scaling decoders were deployed for each room and system with 10G uplinks to central aggregate switches. The NAV models are compatible with 10G endpoints, eliminating the need for additional devices. Control room operators are able to monitor all ongoing sessions and correct any issues when or even before they arise. Several remote operation capabilities are facilitated over the NAV system including audio mixing and control of the PTZ cameras. UNCW also that appreciated NAV is an economical solution, which helped the project stay below budget.

Here is the full case study: https://www.extron.com/article/uncw