North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library Brings A/V and IT Together

Immersive digital signage, 7K video walls and professional quality audio create a digital playground that inspires research and innovation.

August 31, 2014 Chrissy Winske Leave a Comment

The James B. Hunt Jr. Library is 221,000 square foot facility that opened in April on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh at a cost of $115 million. It has been aptly described as a “technology sandbox” as it is home to several immersive digital learning environments including the Creative Studio, Game Lab and Virtualization Theatre. NCSU is part of the Research Triangle, an area anchored by Duke University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill.

North Carolina’s Research Triangle is recognized a main center of gaming development, with one of the most dense concentrations of gaming companies in the U.S. The Hunt Library’s Game Lab doubles as a development lab and a place where students can take a break and play their favorite console games. It features a 20-foot-wide Christie MicroTile display wall, which can be augmented into 80 disparate LED cubes, each measuring 10 inches x 12 inches. The multi-channel audio system features a 5.1 K-array set up with three KK102 line array elements positioned horizontally at left, right and center of the display wall.

Located on the main level of the library, the Immersion Theater serves as a presentation space for faculty to show off their research, and a space for students to discuss and review their projects. It features a 20-foot curved Christie MicroTile display wall as well as K-array sound system. “We originally thought of limiting the audio requirements to just voice reproduction, but after discussion we realized we needed a much richer sound environment,” York recalls. “Part of the acoustic challenge was that the space was open to the main traffic throughway. We had to contain the sound inside of the space so it didn’t bleed out into the reading rooms, but still provide an engaging audio experience.” The solution was to deploy several of K-array’s KV50 ultra slim line arrays in the ceiling, along with KU36 ultra slim subwoofers, which were mounted above the video wall. This combination created focused and powerful sound dispersion for those working in the space, without distracting students in the nearby reading rooms.

The Teaching and Visualization lab is designed with similar design principles as an open, black box theater.

“We wanted to create a room in the facility that was adaptable enough that we could constantly change it,” York explains.

The room features an open infrastructure overhead, as well as exposed walls and flooring so pipe grids, cables, electricity and other items can be easily accessed and adjusted. Surrounding the room is a 270-degree projection screen, which provides an immersive, three-sided wraparound visual experience. Audio is covered with a 5.1 surround system from K-array, which includes three KK102 line arrays mounted horizontally in the front (left, right and center), and two KK52s for rear left and rear right channels. The sub-bass system, a K-array KMT12P, is mounted above and suspended from the ceiling deck. In mounting the speakers, integrator AVI/SPL deployed an intelligent clamping system enabling speakers to be repositioned as needed.

Similar in design to the Teaching and Visualization lab in its ‘black box theater’ approach, the Creativity Studio is a multi-collaboration environment designed for many people to use simultaneously. The space features sixteen 10-foot x 4-foot whiteboard panels that can be moved, reconfigured or retracted to meet the specific needs of a project, making the room extremely flexible. Large screens on both sides of the room and two rotating walls in the middle enable it to function as separate rooms or as one large space.

K-array’s KK102 loudspeaker was used extensively throughout the A/V installation of NC State’s Hunt Library.

The James B. Hunt Jr. Library has been aptly described as a “technology sandbox.” It certainly seems that way to the faculty and students who teach and learn there. Collaborative platforms allow unheard-of levels of interactivity between teachers and students, who can now display their work on huge video walls with luminosity levels and in 5.1 highly directed audio that would make either Hollywood or the Pentagon envious.

But those two institutions are also some of the many participants that will benefit from this sandbox, because NC State is key cog in North Carolina’s broader Research Triangle, where academe, industry, government and military routinely intersect, creating new technologies and products from that massive synergy. That’s what makes the new Hunt Library so vital: it’s a reinvention of the very notion of a library, from repository to laboratory and imaginarium, which can address a broad range of work from engineering to chemistry to software. Think Disney only with much better lasers. Putting that together takes the idea of the storied convergence between A/V and IT to another plane.

Choosing Platforms

The 221,000 square foot facility opened in April 2013 on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh at a cost of $115 million and it was a huge challenge to pull together, recalls Maurice York, head of Information Technology for NCSU Libraries, NC State University.

“It needed to be able to be a research and development environment that could also take a product from a conceptual stage through prototyping and into a final end-product stage, all in a single place. We had to figure out what the right mix of spaces and technologies would be for that,” he says.

What the Library became is a sleek warren of complex interactivity, one that simultaneously beckons and challenges its occupants. There are five primary A/V environments: the Game Lab, the Teaching and Visualization Lab, the Immersion Theater, the Creativity Studio and the Auditorium. Each space has a completely different technology focus and design program. For instance, the Immersion Theater serves as a presentation space for faculty and students to discuss and review their projects. It features a 20-foot curved display wall, made up of some of the 492 Christie MicroTiles that comprise the displays throughout all five spaces, as well as the five Christie Spyder X20 video processors that manage that video, which in some cases approach 7K in native resolution. Sound throughout the facility uses Sennheiser K-array KK102 thin-line modular line arrays, which were able to provide full-range audio in an extremely small footprint.

Getting great A/V technology wasn’t the hard part, says York. It was choosing which to use from a cornucopia of high-tech providers who wanted to be part of the prestigious project. York says choices had to be made based on a number of critical factors, including the ability to scale, ease of use and maintenance. For example, one of the reasons they chose the Christie video wall components is it offers the ability to replace a single tile when needed without disrupting the wall’s use, and the potential for future-proofing.

“We had to look for things that would not only enable the program, but would also be sustainable,” says York. “To do that, we had to literally get inside their technologies. Typically, an educational technology center like this has to be within two years of the state of the art to be safe, but we have to be right at the edge, all the time, to make this attractive not only to students and teachers but also to everyone who would want to use its resources.”