At InfoComm today Oblong Industries announced the release of the Mezzanine 3, which will expand the capabilities of the system in some major ways.
Mezzanine is an interactive collaboration and presentation solution that allows teams to concurrently see and work on multiple inputs of information regardless of their physical location. A remote, called a ‘wand,’ controls video, application, and content inputs on screens spread across the room; pulling, opening, closing, and resizing. That same information is mirrored and controlled in linked conference rooms in real time, with employees able to manipulate data from any location.
Consider that a sales team is in one location, research and development is in another, and engineering is in a third. Each group can work within their Mezzanine or work together through the combined Mezzanines. The sales team can pull up a spreadsheet, the engineers can blow it up and circle specific figures, and research and development can run a presentation showing how far their work has come. This all happens at the same time, mirrored on every screen. It’s great for corporate environments where companies have multiple locations and multiple groups.
With the Mezzanine today the corkboards are great for their ability to pin content. You can take a graphic, drag it over, and park it on the visual corkboards. Now, the corkboards are a true extension of the Mezzanine workspace. Any live stream, video, or graphics can be brought to the corkboards. In addition, corkboards can be joined to create a unified video wall. The limit is as far as your imagination and budget can stretch, as the default Mezzanine can support up to 6 screen, while hardware can be added to account for an unlimited amount of additional corkboards.
“We talk about Mezzanine, sometimes it’s called an architectural computer,” says David Kung, VP of Product Strategy at Oblong, “But it really is a visual collaboration solution. With the Mezzanine 3 we now have enhanced, extended, and expanded that workspace to multiple walls and screens. You can truly activate the room.”
In addition to the corkboards, several new features will be rolled out with the new release. The new Mezzanine will allow for 4K content for 4K displays. Audiovisual conferencing has been fully integrated; A remoter in the Mezzanine environment can now contribute to and control aspects of the workspace from a laptop, without the need of a VPN. The ability to answer or trigger a call within the Mezzanine user interface as well as streamlined videoconferencing within the Mezzanine user interface will also be added in this release.
“Mezzanine 3 is an array of capabilities that we will be bringing to market starting later this year, and we will continue to enhance and grow the extended workspace,” says Kung. “It’s tremendously exciting.”
Current Mezzanine owners under a maintenance contract can upgrade to the Mezzanine 3 free of cost, though you may wish to contact your integrator to utilize the new multi-corkboard abilities.
If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!
Leave a Reply