Meeting Owl Review
The Meeting Owl: A Review (April 2018)
The Meeting Owl is not your typical video conferencing bird. This camera/speakerphone combination has a 360° camera, allowing the remote participants in the video conferencing meeting to see the entire room. So, instead of placing the camera/speakerphone combo at one end of the table by the video display, the Meeting Owl would be placed closer to the middle of the table. It’s height is 10.75 inches, with a diameter of 4.4 inches.
The Meeting Owl’s “eyes” light up when the unit is sending audio and video. The 360° camera sits atop the Meeting Owl. There are no moving parts. The video output is 720 HD (1280 x 720 @30fps). It has an 8-microphone array with a specification of a 12 foot radius, and echo cancellation capability.
At the base of the unit are speaker volume controls and mute buttons for the microphone. A red LED strip lights up just above the buttons when the mic array is muted. Curiously, the icon for the mic mute is of a camera with a slash through it, not a mic icon. The camera is not turned off with those buttons. (It was a firmware change after the manufacture of the unit.) Use your video conferencing program to turn off the camera.
The speaker has a nice tone and gets decently loud. Like the microphone array, the speaker is 360° so that everyone in the room can clearly hear the audio.
The unit has 2 cables, USB to the computer, and a power cord with a small power brick.
The Meeting Owl is covered in a grey woven fabric rather than a metal grill. Unfortunately, the velcro straps that I use to manage the cables have already attached themselves to the fabric several times. Over time, that will fuzz-up the fabric. Plus, the fabric will collect hand oils when the unit is moved around.
There is a free smartphone app (Android and iOS), used to first set up the Meeting Owl, as well to manually control the camera to stay focused on one portion of the video image. It uses a Bluetooth connection to the smartphone for configuration and control, and a WiFi connection to automatically update its firmware as well as to keep track of meeting analytics.
The Video
The video that the Meeting Owl sends to the computer is what is impressive. A 360° panoramic view is placed across the top of the video image, and the Meeting Owl automatically displays the person talking in the main area of the video. When another person starts talking, the Meeting Owl’s microphone array detects where that person is and adds that person to the main video area, up to three people at a time. They call this “Speaker Spotlight”. All of the audio and video processing is done internally to the Meeting Owl, there is no additional computing load on the computer. To the computer, the Meeting Owl is just another webcam and speakerphone.
In the first photo, we see 3 people in the 360° panorama view, with the first person talking “spotlighted” in the main view.
The second person has started to speak. The Meeting Owl slides in the person into the main view.
The third person then joins the conversation, and he is inserted into the main view.
Using the Meeting Owl
Installing and configuring the Meeting Owl is straightforward. Set up the cables and connect it to a USB port on your computer. Plug-n-play automatically installs the drivers. Install the Meeting Owl App on your smartphone or tablet. The app uses Bluetooth to connect to the Meeting Owl. In the app, name the Meeting Owl and enter the WiFi information so that it can update itself to the latest firmware. Under the About Owl section of the app, you can review your Owl’s information, register your Owl, view the tutorial, select which video conferencing software you use, and manually check for firmware updates.
When the Meeting Owl is first plugged in and starts up, its ‘eyes’ light up and blink. It hoots “hoo-hoohoo” when it’s done starting up. In operation, when the Meeting Owl is activated for a video conference, it displays a start up page for several seconds while initializing before it displays the video. During a meeting, it can take several seconds for the Meeting Owl to spotlight the next person talking. I assume that the delay is partly dependent on how loud and continuous the person is speaking, as well as the Owl not wanting to jump too quickly to another person who sneezed. If several people are speaking at the same time, it doesn’t do anything, waiting for one person to be the primary talker before spotlighting that person.
To manually control where the Meeting Owl spotlights the video, use the Meeting Owl app to connect to the unit. Select Camera Lock, then drag the control box left or right to slide the Owl’s focus left or right in the panoramic view until the spotlight is where you want it. For example, if someone is moving back and forth while writing on a whiteboard, you can control the Owl’s spotlight to follow the person’s movement, or, keep the spotlight on a section of the whiteboard even if the person moves away or another person is talking. Alternately, you may want to lock the spotlight on the person talking if there’s a noise elsewhere in the room that could attract the Owl’s spotlight (e.g. another person coughing).
Discussion
Because the Meeting Owl captures the entire room, this allows more options in the layout of the conference room. The TV display and camera are typically placed at the narrow end of a rectangular conference room or table, often due to the limited field of view of the camera (fixed orientation or pan/tilt/zoom [PTZ]). The Meeting Owl could allow the room layout to be wide, square, or even use a circular conference table.
During a meeting, the remote participants will be aware of everyone in the room. They won’t experience a disembodied voice suddenly coming from off-camera or be surprised to discover that a particular person is attending the meeting but just sitting out of view.
In a typical video conferencing layout, the camera is usually directly above or below the display screen. Everyone in the room is looking in the same direction at the screen so that the camera captures a relatively straight-on view of people’s faces. But, once there is a conversation among the people in the room, the remote participants could see much less of several people’s faces and not get the physical cues of the discussion. Also, the people at the very far end of the table may be too far away from the camera to even be identifiable, or not audible if the speakerphone is at the far end of the table or on the camera.
When using the Meeting Owl, there’s a different set of things to consider. Since the unit will be placed closer to the middle of the table, the remote participants will feel in the midst of any group conversations and individual spotlighted people will feel closer. The Meeting Owl will be closer to the person sitting at the far end of the table and more likely to pick up their voice. The overall volume level to the remote participants should be more balanced (unless the loudest person in the room is sitting the closest to the Owl).
However, the Meeting Owl’s camera is no longer relatively in-line with the TV display for many of the people in the room. People will naturally look at the TV display rather than looking at the Meeting Owl when talking to the remote participants. This creates a visual disconnect for the remote participants - they are being spoken to, but the talker sitting near the Meeting Owl is presenting more of a profile view of their face. An example of this is the third screenshot above where all three people in the room are looking at the TV display.
Video conferencing participants are accustomed to experiencing the minor visual disconnect of people’s eyes looking above, below, or to the side, rather than the eye-to-eye experience of face-to-face conversations. The remote participants will need to adjust to the more significant visual disconnect of the Meeting Owl spotlighting a person’s facial profile. The in-room participant could help by more frequently talking towards the Meeting Owl rather than towards the TV display. But that means the in-room talker may miss some visual responses from the remote participants.
The Meeting Owl can be a great benefit in a group discussion meeting. The in-room participants will look at and talk to the other in-room participants. The remote participants will be able to see more facial and physical expressions of the in-room participants, helping them to feel more involved in the discussion rather than disconnected observers. Being that the Meeting Owl automatically spotlights who is talking, a person in the room won’t need to constantly point a PTZ camera to whoever is talking.
If the meeting has primarily one main in-room talker/leader/presenter, that person should position themselves more in-line with the Meeting Owl and display screen. The remote participants will feel that they are sitting at the table and among the other in-room participants.
If the meeting format is more of an ‘us & them’ dialog; ‘us’ being the in-room participants and ‘them’ being all the remote participants, perhaps a more traditional video conferencing set up would be a better fit to minimize the visual disconnect of where the in-room people are looking.
Conclusion:
The Meeting Owl offers an innovative way of presenting the video conference experience to the remote participants, and creates new options on how to layout a conference room. The remote participants will feel more like they are sitting at the table and not standing against the far wall. However, some remote participants may not like or adjust to seeing the side of someone’s face when talking with them in the video conference.
The Meeting Owl is by OwlLabs.com and is priced at $799 US.
[January 2021: The original Meeting Owl is now obsolete, replaced by the Meeting Owl Pro, ~$975. Definitely worth the upgrade with improved video and audio quality, and additional features.]