Are your hybrid meetings boring? Do the remote participants sometimes feel disconnected or ignored? We accepted these limitations during the pandemic because we all expected to return to the office with its in-person environment. However, post-pandemic, it’s clear that very few staff are coming back full-time, and those hybrid meetings will continue as a frequent feature of work life indefinitely.
To address these issues, Canon demonstrated its new AMLOS hybrid meeting product at CES 2023. Its design improves the engagement of remote participants in hybrid meetings. The product consists of the following:
- A self-correcting pan, tilt, zoom (PTZ) camera.
- The ability to livestream multiple views of the meeting room to remote participants.
- Software that manages the livestream distribution and enables the camera to respond to hand gestures.
AMLOS makes hybrid meetings authentic and customizable. Meeting room participants can direct the camera to zoom in on specific people, the whiteboard, and areas in the room. Remote participants can select their preferred livestream or stills from the meeting room to configure up to three views of the meeting on their monitor. Everyone feels like they are physically present with the team.
The facilitator can use various hand gestures to:
- Start the meeting.
- Spotlight a room view and livestream a still image or a video.
- Capture the whiteboard, angle-correct the image and livestream it.
- End the meeting.
AMLOS operates in conjunction with the videoconferencing software of your choice; it’s not another brand of videoconferencing software for everyone to learn, or IT to install and support. The facilitator starts AMLOS in the meeting room and pastes its URL into the chat for all remote participants to launch in their browsers. AMLOS is most useful on a two-monitor computer, where you show your videoconferencing software on one monitor and show the AMLOS display in the browser window of the second monitor.
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