Florida International University Serves Up Collaborative Technology in Its New Restaurant Lab

To support this collection of technology, FIU received a hefty $20 million donation from the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, which just celebrated it thirteenth year, and features celebrity chefs like Martha Stewart.

Gomez says one of the biggest challenges of this project was getting all of the technology to talk to each other.

“We went through three different programmers because the job was so challenging,” he says.

However, Zoran Visnjic, Senior AV Sales Engineer for AVI-SPL and the project manager for the Chaplin School, says that the challenges were met and well worth it.

“The ROI for this project is more about exposure and raising awareness,” he says. “It’s more for personal gain, to show off the school and expose it to the rest of the world to see what’s out there.

“It’s nice to see your baby growing up and start running,” he says.

For colleges looking to build a restaurant lab on campus, look at these take-aways before diving in:

For technology decision makers:

1) Invest in good pan-tilt-zoom cameras

Marci Powell, Global Director for Education and Training at Polycom, says that PTZ cameras will give instructors a 360 degree angle of their work space.

“You can see what’s going on in the classrooms,” she says. “If the content cameras are mounted above the cooking area, you can get a shot from the ceiling for a top-down perspective to see what the chefs are doing…with the preset labs, the cameras are mounted in different sections, like where the sink is, or where the pastries are made. The chefs can use these without looking over the students’ shoulders.”

2) Look into a videoconferencing system

Powell says that there are lots of requests for videoconferencing technology in the hospitality field.

“[Places] want to add people via videoconferencing, such as higher level executives that wouldn’t normally travel,” she says. “Schools use it for a combination of what to expect in the industry and to connect with other campuses.”

Plus, Powell says videoconferencing enables students to country-hop without leaving the lab.

“You can take students virtually all over the world,” she says. “The next best thing to immersion in a new culture is to virtually immerse people.”