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.

A/V Meets IT

As a result of the partnering program, which brought in not only products and systems but also expertise and training, the Library’s technology budget wasn’t its biggest challenge. That, says York, was reserved for that overlap between A/V and IT. In a reversal of the usual paradigm in which A/V specialists face IT’s networked landscape with some trepidation, it was the library’s IT staff who had to quickly acquire their own A/V chops. The heavy lifting initially was done in conjunction with the A/V systems designer the Sextant Group and A/V systems integrator AVI-SPL, but the systems would need considerable management and maintenance going forward. While the library’s technology complement could be largely fleshed out via the partnering, the facility was coming together in the midst of the worst economy in memory, and state funds for additional staff simply weren’t available. York recalls nicking desktop computers from other sites on campus to get the library up and running (before they decided to move all computing to a centralized server room to make data available through a wider range of devices as part of a virtualization strategy).

“We had to redirect some of our IT people and retrain them for A/V,” he says. “A lot of that was literally on the job, as the manufacturer partners sent trainers in to show us how their systems needed to be set up. We were training as we were installing — Christie had someone on site teaching us how to build the MicroTile walls, and we have people going to Biamp for two weeks of training there. We were an IT shop, we had never had to run A/V on this kind of scale.”

In a sense, training will always be ongoing at the Hunt Library, because its technology partners will use it as a test bed to stretch their own technical envelopes, and see what NC State’s geniuses are doing with it. York says some students have already developed apps that monitor and manage the temperature and other parameters of the Christie video wall system.

“It’s a two-way street, really,” he says. “They’ll have access to what the students and faculty learn about their products. The partners have put a lot into this but they stand to reap some benefits, as well. It’s their sandbox, too.”