HyFlex learning has transformed higher education, bringing with it real challenges for the AV/IT pros who create and maintain hybrid classrooms. In this webinar, join UNC’s Gary Kayye and Nureva’s Rob Abbott and James Rempel as they explore how our innovative tech can make postsecondary classes more flexible and engaging — without causing strains on IT budgets. You’ll also hear how UNC is using our audio systems for successful HyFlex learning plus get a live demo of our HDL310 system.
1:40 — The origins of Nureva® audio
4:36 — UNC’s classroom of the future
6:30 — Microphone Mist™ technology advantages
8:20 — Live demo of the HDL310 system
9:51 — Flexibility and the future of learning
12:42 — Why cameras matter
14:27 — Divisible classroom setups
18:02 — Easier device setup and management
19:50 — What’s next for higher ed AV/IT
24:43 — How to design the best audio-equipped space
26:02 — Nureva’s plans for the future
Gary Kayye: Hey everyone, this is Gary Kayye, and I want to welcome all my LinkedIn followers and rAVe’s LinkedIn followers to a special live LinkedIn event. We are coming to you live here. I’ve got a couple of gentlemen with me who represent one of my favorite brands, Nureva. I don’t think it’s any secret that I’m a big fan of Nureva. Rob Abbott, VP of products, how are you doing?
Rob Abbott: Great! Thanks for the endorsement, Gary. And I know it comes from a genuine place because you use it directly.
Gary: Exactly. You’re not paying me to say that. I use it all the time. And we’ve got them all over campus now at UNC. In fact, over the years probably 40 to 50 university campuses have called me and asked me to dial in so they can see it and walk around the room and stuff. I know I’ve probably been a good indirect salesperson for you, James. But I want to have you introduce yourself because you actually spent some time in one of my classrooms last semester.
James Rempel: I did! I got to see a bunch of your classrooms. So, my name is James Rempel, director of product management here at Nureva. And I got to see the beautiful UNC campus and got to see a bunch of the classrooms in the journalism department. A really impressive setup.
Gary: Well, technically we’re called the Hussman School of Journalism and Media but that’s OK. We’ll come back to that! As many may know, I’m a professor of advertising and branding at the University of North Carolina in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. I’ve also grown up, my entire professional life, in the AV industry. So, I’m kind of in a weirdly unique position where I’m actually using the classrooms and then also from the AV world.
Gary: And Rob, I think that’s kind of how we got connected. I knew Nancy [Knowlton], the founder of Nureva, was working on starting a new company. I’d heard it had something to do with classroom audio. It was back in, I don’t know, the mid [2010s]. And I was like, “Please help me. Here’s the problem. Here’s a laundry list of items that we need help with.” It really came down to the complication of miking.
But actually, let me back up. What you’re going to watch is everything you need to know about what’s going on in HyFlex and active learning classrooms. So, if you’re in higher education, but even K–12 if you’re the kind of K–12 that really values quality, this is a session for you. The truth is, Rob, there’s going to be a lot of people that can’t afford what they might want to be able to afford.
But let’s go back to what I was saying. In 2015, 2016. I felt bad for students who could not attend my classes — they were athletes or sick — and I felt bad for them. It was hard because as professors we can’t just come in and put on a mic every day and make sure the batteries are working and then make sure that on the far side they’re getting the signal and everything. So, I came to Nancy and I basically said this is the problem. And she said, “I’ve got something coming for you.” And Rob, you had it all up.
Rob: Yeah, it came from a place of unsolved problems. Basically, we had a huge background in interactive displays, interactive whiteboards. In our DNA is the idea that you’re not sitting at a table, you’re not sitting around staring into the center of the table. You’re working, you’re writing, your back is to the table, you’re moving. So, it’s from this idea of active collaboration and active teaching — it’s a huge problem for microphone pickup. That was the gap that we saw in the market. And then how do you do that in a way that’s affordable, that isn’t a multicomponent DSP-based system. To make it more accessible.
Gary: Yeah, something that could connect … in our case we already had computers in the rooms. We just needed something that could connect to all the computers. We didn’t want to put an audio amp in every single place. We didn’t want to actually add a whole bunch of inputs and stuff. And you came out with the first HDL300, the first unit. I honestly think I might actually have gotten one of the first units installed in the Reese News Lab. Because this was 2017, and I don’t think you had been shipping it long or if it was out long. It was new.
Rob: Yeah, that was early days. And the good news is that product — through firmware updates — just keeps getting better, as well. We’ve moved on to a second generation but the first generation is a solid product with continual firmware updates. We get a lot of great reports of people still getting lots of value out of the system.
Gary: I’m going to put up some pictures here of that actual classroom from 2017. We called it the future of the classroom for UNC. We were sort of building a model. And you can see where it’s installed — it’s out of sight, out of mind. It’s not a substantial location. It’s actually not in the back middle of the classroom, it’s actually in the back left of the classroom. Wide room — almost 40' wide by about 30' deep. We only used one HDL300 in that room. We’re projecting on the wall, as you can see. Everything in that room is on wheels — something I want to talk about, Rob (I’m going to come back to you in just a second, James).
This is what we thought in 2017 was going to be an active learning classroom. We’re going to talk more about the products in a minute, but let’s talk about what happened. We were lucky because we actually had the model for a HyFlex classroom, since we built one, and how to handle hybrid when the pandemic hit.
Let’s fast-forward a couple years, the pandemic hits, and we already knew how to solve the audio problems in all the classrooms because we had been using the HDL. We were like, “Man, wouldn’t this be great to have in every classroom!” But we don’t have the budget for now, so let’s wait for the next tech upgrade cycle. Then all of a sudden the pandemic hits and, James, we placed an order for a bunch.
James: Yeah, as did many universities!
Gary: Well, the key to that is the connectivity, the compatibility, the simplicity of connectivity to all the products in the room. Because it is a walk-up-and-use experience. Whenever the computer’s on, it is on. Whenever you load up Zoom or Teams or whatever you’re using — we use Panopto for recording — it just starts recording. What’s the magic in that James? I understand the model was that walk-up-and-use experience without complexity. But what makes that happen?
James: It’s really our Microphone Mist technology, which allows us to cover a very large area from locations on the wall. The way our technology works is we project thousands of virtual microphones throughout the room. And we can target the entire room, monitor all of those virtual microphones simultaneously and pick the best pickup area — typically where the instructor’s talking or where the students are talking when they’re asking questions or making comments. The big advantage is that no one has to think about it. You don’t have to think about where the microphones are in the room. You just go about your lesson as you normally would, and you have confidence that the system is going to pick up everything that’s said in the room.
Gary: As an example, you’re in a room right now — I don’t know how big your room is, you have to tell us how big it is. How big is that room? It’s bigger than it looks.
James: I think it’s 28' deep by 16' long.
Gary: You can see … I want to ask our producer, we’re live, so I don’t know how easy this is going to be, I don’t know if she can put James mostly full screen. If I caught her by surprise, because we are streaming this on LinkedIn, but you can see the HDL, it looks like a 410, one of the two on the wall right there. What is that?
James: That’s an HDL310. It’s one microphone and speaker bar covering the entire space.
Gary: And that’s what’s cool about it. It doesn’t have to be directly across from the speaker. It doesn’t have to be in a specific location. There we go — we’ve got full screen. Look at that magic. She put us in bubbles and everything. So, do me a favor, I’m going to shut up for a second. I want you to walk around so people can see that you do a great job compressor limiting and balancing the audio no matter where you are.
James: The way the technology works is it knows where I am speaking in the room, so it automatically adjusts gain based on how far away I am from the microphone. So, you get nice, consistent audio levels. You can see this is not an acoustically great room. There are two glass walls, there’s a big reflective table here.
Gary: Two big glass panels on the other wall.
James: Exactly. But the system does a really good job of knowing where I am, targeting my voice and providing clear, consistent audio.
Gary: Walk all the way around the front if you don’t mind. We don’t want to trick anybody — we want to make sure people know you’re not tricking.
James: Here I am at the front of the room. I’m right below the microphone and speaker bar here. So, you can imagine people seated at various locations around the table are all going to get picked up.
Gary: One of the cool demos I do is when somebody says to me, “Is this really going to work this well?” and I’ll go and I’ll turn — if you don’t mind, James, turn around and look out the window that’s behind you — and now walk into that corner right there and I want you to talk.
James: I’m facing away from the microphone …
Gary: You don’t even have to say anything else. If you’re watching this demo, why would you not use this product? He’s facing in the corner! That is the demo that catches everybody. Go ahead and keep talking.
James: If I was really on my game here, I’d crawl under the table!
Gary: He dresses too nicely! Rob, you and I would crawl under the table.
Gary: But I want to kind of jump out of Nureva land for a second. Let’s talk about, like, the concept of active learning classrooms. The microphone is only one piece of the puzzle.
One of the things that we did in 2017 was we took a room that had a whole bunch of permanent desks that are mounted, which is very common in the university system, and we got rid of all of them. We put in tables with wheels, and we put in chairs with wheels.
And that may not seem like a big deal, but the truth of the matter is the new generation, Gen Z, they like to collaborate. And in the world of advertising, we do a lot of collaboration. So, we’re teaching them how to collaborate.
It allows us to build rooms ad hoc. We can make it a traditional classroom style one day and then have them work in groups. And we’ve even done this — James has actually seen this, Rob — with a 200-plus-seat arena that has six different huddle spaces inside of it. So, the students can collaborate (you’re seeing a picture of it right there) in six different areas. It actually works remarkably well, Rob. You can imagine that the whole university environment is going to eventually go this way because the idea of linear learning is changing to active learning.
Rob: We certainly see, as we visit customers, talk to our customers, this shift away from a more static lecture hall to a collaborative classroom. Some of our customer advisors are going completely through a revamp of that right now.
But more subtly, I was telling you before the call, I’ve just been on the road visiting customers for the last couple of weeks. What I would really say is what we thought of as a problem room or a tricky room maybe 5 years ago is now 80% of rooms you walk into. The furniture is on casters, there’s some element of flexible layouts, one room needs to support two or three different teaching styles. Often now, the rooms are being used for faculty meetings and classrooms and something in the evenings. It’s just very dynamic. Everything’s on wheels. Everything’s moving. And how do you support that with a small team?
Gary: And you also have no such thing as the front of the room exclusively anymore. That is another thing that’s happened. I’m going to show you some classrooms now that we have at UNC where we have two different fronts of rooms in each classroom — and actually more if you decide. You could be an instructor and teach in front of the windows if you want and just have your students turn. The idea that the material on the screen is going to lead the meeting or lead the classroom is not what we do anymore. I think a lot of us like to teach and collaborate with the students and use that as supporting material. It’s allowed us to teach nonlinearly.
Gary: James, one of the complications there comes … audio is great, but we all need video, too. This would not be interesting to just listen to on LinkedIn. We want video. You have done something unique, and some of the other audio companies have done this, let’s be honest, but you were the first that I saw do this, where you’re able to both control the camera or send a signal to make a PTZ camera control better and more accurate. I want you to explain that — why do we care about that and how does that actually work?
James: It’s not just about one camera, it’s often about multiple cameras. Because in a classroom you, of course, want to see the instructor, but the instructor might be in different locations. And it’s also important to see the students in the classroom as well, especially when you’re getting into class discussion or Q&A sessions. So how do you choose which camera is going to give you the best view? It really depends on who’s talking and where the conversation’s going. Just by virtue of our Microphone Mist technology, we know where in a room people are talking.
With our HDL410 product, we can export XY coordinates in the room over an API, and there’s several camera manufacturers that have made use of this information to do both camera steering and switching.
Gary: Yeah, and companies like AVer I know is compatible. Give me some of the brands.
James: Yeah, Lumens, PTZOptics …. Then we’ve also been working with a company called INOGENI, which has a simple USB camera switcher. We have an integration with that that can create very simple, cost-effective camera switching.
Gary: You also have an integration with Extron from a global control perspective that gives you even a higher level. In our school, we’re actually using Extron to know when the room is a single room or two different rooms, because we have a divisible wall. In that case, we did something really unique. I want to put up some pictures that I think are a little unique. And I know that it was not easy for you, James. What we did was, we put two [HDL310s] in there. And somehow, you’re switching, thanks to Extron, you’re getting the information so that you know when the room is supposed to be used … individually versus together. They make one system.
James: Yeah, our technology lends itself very well to divisible rooms because every time you connect a bar or disconnect a bar, it automatically recalibrates to the space. So, what we have in the room you’re showing is two HDL310s and then we’re using an Ethernet switch to programmatically switch the two independent HDL310s to a single audio system that can cover the combined space. All it takes is a push of a button or a command from the Extron® system and the audio system will automatically recalibrate to the new configuration.
Gary: We’ve been using Nureva so long that our models are 00 and now you have 10. You have 310 and 410. What’s the difference, Rob, between the different models that are available now?
Rob: We try to keep it simple. Our positioning is really based on size of room, so the higher the number, the bigger the space. The difference between a 310 and a 410 is a 310 is a single bar system and the 410 is a dual bar system. What the dual bar system gives you, in addition to a fuller coverage in a bigger space, is (as James was saying) this layer of acoustic data. Beyond just giving you great pickup, a layer of acoustic data includes things like the sound location API. So, we’re really thinking about multiple levels of data so you can be heard but also do good integrations with control systems and with camera systems.
Gary: You’ve also added a console box that’s kind of the hub. It allows you to plug it all into this. Am I calling it the right thing?
Rob: You’re not, but close. Console is our device management and monitoring service and software.
Gary: That’s right. That’s the software. We’re going to come to that in a second. What is the box called?
Rob: The box is just called the connect module.
Gary: And that makes it where you don’t have to worry about not having enough USB ports on your computers and to manage the different devices coming in?
Rob: Really, we made it so it’s really easy to get power and connectivity to the bars, just through power over Ethernet. They all meet in this connect module, which is typically close to your PC. That’s what connects via USB to the PC. So, it does a lot of the kind of heavy lifting in the audio processing but in a way that is invisible to the user and doesn’t require tuning or tweaking the way a DSP does.
Gary: And, so invisible that me teaching in the room doesn’t even know what it’s called!
Rob: Well, we didn’t give it a sexy name on purpose.
Gary: I just know it’s there! OK, James, let’s talk about Console because that’s been kind of a game changer. And, just recently, I should mention that you also introduced an application so you can control it from a mobile device, which is to me, is an actual game changer. In the early days, let me be honest with you, I had to have a Windows PC. So, you’ve come a long way! You’ve recognized the Mac but also now you have mobile device control.
James: Yeah, Console, as Rob mentioned, is our cloud-based device management platform. We found that IT managers responsible for classroom technology at universities, once they have multiple systems, the question becomes how do you manage those at scale? IT departments are notoriously short on staff, and they need ways of streamlining their workflows. And that’s really what Console does. It provides a single cloud-based dashboard where you can see all your Nureva devices online. You can monitor them, you can change settings, you can extract acoustic data as well. So that’s for remote monitoring.
What we’ve recently introduced is what we call the Nureva App. That’s a tool for in-room configuration. You can connect to our devices over the LAN. You don’t even need an internet connection, you can have access to all of the controls and settings of our devices.
Gary: That’s nice because, as I said, in the original install we did we had to find a Windows laptop. Because we’re a Mac school. We literally had to find a Windows laptop and we actually kept one around for that. But now we don’t have to worry about that.
Gary: So, I want to ask you a question, Rob. You said you just spent time traveling around, plus you have interfaced with hundreds of universities over the last few years with Microphone Mist technology, the concept. Where is all of this heading? I only sit in my little naïve space in North Carolina. But where’s this going? What are we going to see? What are people asking for now?
Rob: There’s an overriding theme of a need to do more with less that James touched on. I don’t think that’s necessarily a new problem, it’s just the reality of education funding and refresh cycles and budgeting. I think they’re getting asked to do more. The technology needs to do more. Even things like, when I talk to a lot of AV managers, almost all of them have told me not only am I now responsible for the classrooms, I’m responsible for the faculty meeting rooms. Typically, that’s like, “I had 300 classroom spaces, now I have an additional 100 meeting room spaces, same number of people, and I have 100 more rooms to manage.” So, this problem of scale. What they ask for is, “I need a technology and products that I can put in once and never touch it again.” It’s this one-touch rule. They can’t go back and tweak the room if it’s suddenly divisible or suddenly the layout of the furniture has moved. I think that theme is continuing.
Gary: Can I ask you about that? I’ll make a point about that because I think this point needs to be made. A microphone is a microphone. The technology behind a microphone has not changed much in 70, 80 years when it comes to what it’s actually doing. What the magic is, in what you just said, is that if you buy what we have now, we’re going to keep it updated with firmware and software so you’re not worrying about having to reinvest every 3, 5 or even 10 years in this technology. Because we’re just going to keep making Microphone Mist technology better, but we’re also going to keep using all of the new DSP features as they come out. And probably AI — I think you’re going to see a lot more machine learning and AI built into this technology. I know you don’t want to spill the beans. But I think it’s important for people to understand what you just said there. Because the nuance in your statement might get lost.
Rob: Thanks for calling that out. And a real practical example, we kind of touched on it already, but the idea of a system that continuously auto-calibrates is so foundational. When you think about how messy these spaces are, how the tables are moving, the furniture is moving — I think that is the fundamental thing people want. “I need to know that as I move my classrooms’ configurations and layouts around, as the lecture style changes, will it continue to work? OK, it works now, after we just set it up and got it running, but will it continue to work?” I think this is what really they’re asking for. An AV manager, an IT manager in a university, they really need solutions that can do that as they scale. Because there’s not enough of them for the number of rooms they have to manage.
Gary: At what point, now that you’re so software heavy, do you start even more integration into LMSs and recording systems and maybe even — you got your connections with the camera companies, but why not now do the same thing with Panopto and Zoom and Teams and so on and so forth? So that you’re automating that process as well with Canvas and with Blackboard and with Sakai and all those other companies out there.
Rob: I think we already do that. Our API strategy is very much API first. So, all of those integrations are possible. Our key ecosystem partners are Microsoft and Zoom. These are people we work with closely to make sure the out-of-the-box integration is there. Certification testing. Really all those subtleties of where is the noise filtering happening, where’s the echo cancellation happening, how is all that working together — that is very much part and parcel.
We always are with something else. Ecosystem is critical to what we do. So, Gary, I think almost natively as a USB audio device, we just work really well with lecture capture systems without a whole lot of extra integration needed. I think there’s always the opportunity to integrate the, maybe the workflows where things are more automatically happening. But from a pure audio quality into their systems, it works well as is. It is our assumption that audio is being captured in multiple ways by multiple other systems at all times.
Gary: James, if you could design the best possible space, where do you put the microphone? Do you try to always put the microphone across the room from where … if we have a space and we know where the presenter is going to be standing, the teacher, is it directly across? What is the perfect design criteria for Nureva?
James: It depends on what you’re doing in the room. But generally, having a microphone and speaker bar across from where the instructor is talking is the best. Certainly, if we’re leveraging the audio location data for camera tracking, generally a perpendicular arrangement of the bars provides the greatest accuracy.
Gary: I guess that makes logical sense, but you can’t always do it. Sometimes you have glass on one of those walls and the person in charge of the room just says, “No, you’re not going to put it there,” so you don’t have a lot of choice.
James: Yeah, it’s very flexible. You can see in this room here we have the microphone and speaker bar on the side wall of the meeting room, which is unusual. Oftentimes, people like to have the microphone and speaker bar on the front wall. It will work in either configuration. We like it here because, for demonstrations, it’s in the camera view.
Gary: Rob, what can we expect in the future? I know you just said you’re going to keep it updated, but I know you haven’t stopped engineering.
Rob: Absolutely. I think that the Nureva App was a big addition to the platform, essentially an additional pillar to the platform. So, we’re putting a lot of focus on what value can we add in a simple-to-use app, pre-install and post-install.
Acoustical challenges aren’t going anywhere. Poor acoustics are kind of a fact of life. So, one of the areas we’re focusing on is, can we put more acoustic measurement, acoustic analytics in the hands of the installer, whether that’s in-house or through a reseller pre-install, to say where should we put the system or are you going to have background reverberance problems, before you encounter them? So, we feel that we can really extend our experience even a step before you’ve purchased a Nureva product or installed it.
Gary: You can have this technology design expertise ahead of time so that you can plan. And I guess you’ll look at, are we retrofitting a room versus are we able to start a room from scratch. Because if you’re able to build a room to specs and you’re able to put it wherever you want, that’s going to have a different result than if you have to retrofit.
Rob: Exactly. I think it’s just adding value. What are our customers complaining about? They’re saying, “I need help. I’m not an acoustic expert and I want to be able to do this myself.” Or, “I’m a reseller. I don’t have a lot of audio background. Give me more tools to work through this.” We’ll continue to work on our sound location data accuracy.
Another use case that we’re really seeing value in is what we call Voice Amplification Mode. So, the idea of your voice being amplified in the room while it’s still being captured in a Teams or Zoom call. And just all the nuances of making that work really well from an echo perspective. Get a great experience for the remote students AND the in-room students. We’re trying to really double down on that part of functionality. We’re seeing as HyFlex settles out that’s one of the … lecture capture, voice amplification with distributed students, those are the core bread and butter use cases that we see being established.
Gary: A lot of people know it in our industry as voice lift, but I think you’re taking it to the next level. You’re doing something beyond just what’s considered traditional voice lift.
Rob: Well, we’re doing voice amplification but at the same time you’re picking up students and capturing it in a live distributed call.
Gary: Yeah, and that’s difficult to do. I agree with you, I think that’s going to be the future. Because you are going to have rooms big enough where you would wish you could amplify the audio in a specific area of the room, but everyone else can hear fine, and you don’t want to have to mic the presenter, necessarily. I think you gave us some secret sauce there about some of the things you’re working on.
If you don’t know who Nureva is, and we’ve been popping it up here on the screen for you, but it’s nureva.com. Of course, if you’ve been watching us on LinkedIn, you’ve seen the links down there. We’ve been talking about it as we’ve been doing this and also showing you stuff that we’ve been working on. So, Rob, I want to thank you very much for doing this, I really appreciate the knowledge base. And, James, I appreciate you doing the demo. You definitely proved it.
Rob: Thanks for your time again, Gary. Good luck with your new HDL orders and installs.
Gary: Yeah, well, it isn’t me, it’s the great IT and AV people that we have at UNC. I’ve just been happy to be part of that first original demo, getting that first system out there, so I appreciate you all supporting us as well.
And if you want to get a real demo from a real classroom, just contact me. I’ll actually do a real demo from one of my classrooms. Of course, you can always contact Nureva — that’s what they do all day long. And they have all different size rooms and spaces and stuff that you can test out. If you see them at a trade show, definitely go by there and let them do that test for you with the headphones on. Again, Nureva is at nureva.com. Rob Abbott, James Rempel, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Y’all have a great day, and I want to thank everyone for watching us on LinkedIn, this special LinkedIn Live edition, brought to you thanks to the products and the people from Nureva.