Photographed by Howard Brundrett
FRESH is an annually convened global conference specialising in meeting design and experimentation of new formats, techniques, tools and technologies within the meeting industry. This year FRESH experimented with the format of transcontinental, Multi-Hub Meetings. Since its inception in 2012, it has hosted more than 600 meeting design professionals, entrepreneurs and experts from all over the world. The most recent instalment, FRESH18, saw renewed success by pioneering the ground-breaking Spider-Hub Format, which was realised in the form of virtual breakouts and innovative “pitbull” sessions, enabling freer and more natural conversation and dialogue flow between the participants.
Spider-Hub differs from the traditional multi-hub model in that it is segmented into smaller focus groups, and is therefore able to accommodate people with different personalities, bringing everyone to a similar level of engagement. Spider-Hubs also provide a deeper and more personal level of interaction than the traditional multi-hub as it features 6 one to one video calls and 6 break outs in one call, rather than just going along with the general flow of the session. FRESH18 this year enabled cross-hub breakouts and facilitated dialogue between four different meeting hubs, spanning three different time zones: namely London, Copenhagen, Basel and Johannesburg. The biggest hub this year was convened in Basel, with 60 active participants.
This year, AVer sponsored the FRESH Conference 2018 with 15 VC520 Video Conferencing Systems. With a new emphasis on engagement and a unified platform for maximum user operability, AVer’s VC520s were the perfect solution for the complexity of the transcontinental Spider-Hub network, which required steady, high-calibre connections between all participants. With full 1080p HD video and speakerphones that combined a 10W speaker along with 3 embedded directional microphones , the users were able to enjoy an unprecedented level of seamless engagement. AVer’s video conferencing systems played an integral role in connecting individual Spider-Hubs across all of FRESH18, and was the main medium of communication between each hub. The VC520s are easily integrated with existing platforms and require minimum maintenance, freeing up operation costs and technical expenditure. Additionally, the VCs offer cloud-based compatibility, providing a dynamic medium that can be easily adapted to suit the ever-changing demands of a hands-on video conferencing network. Easy to install, operate, and maintain, AVer’s VC systems are designed for maximum engagement in an IoT context, fulfilling the needs of the versatile modern workplace.
“The future of smart communication is going to be recontextualised as video conferencing techniques become more sophisticated,” said Kings Wang, Vice President of AVer. “In the past, traditional VCs focused on merely getting real-time information from one party to another, but now we’ve refined the techniques and technology so that experiences become more personal and there’s more of a human touch. The Spider-Hub experience was different from any of its predecessors in that the VC520 supported its unique communication model of segmentation into smaller groups - since extraverts and introverts interact and engage each other in very different ways, the Spider-Hub was able to accommodate all these different modes of inter-engagement, which was why it was such a success, and one that we hope to repeat again in the near future.”
Photographed by Howard Brundrett
** AVer would like to thank ABBIT Meeting Innovators for their assistance in creating this case study.