Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) is dedicated to developing safe, reliable self-driving transportation for everyone, everywhere. Uber ATG sought to update every conferencing space throughout its three-story headquarters to promote greater usability, as employees found them to be frustrating and difficult to fully utilize.

Garydavid Royce, Uber’s senior design engineer, and Joey Loeffler, vice president of San Antonio Sound & Light, understood that any new AV implementations had to be optimized for each specific space to succeed. Joey knew multiple set-ups would be required to accommodate smaller huddle rooms to larger all-hands spaces.

For small and medium spaces, Joey utilized Devio for its superior sound capabilities and ability to send audio over USB to eMax Minis, the codec used within the platform; for the larger rooms, he determined Tesira, in conjunction with our TCM Beamtracking microphones, provided the necessary components to achieve the desired results.

Biamp’s microphones are built with “invisible comfort” in mind

The guiding principle for the redesign was “invisible comfort,” a concept perfectly aligned with Biamp’s overall philosophy. Both Garydavid and Joey wanted to ensure people could sit or stand anywhere in these rooms and have natural conversations, either with others in the space with them or colleagues on the other end of the line.

By virtue of their ceiling installation, the TCM microphones shift the focus away from the technology and toward the conversation, where it belongs; the Beamtracking technology built within these mics also serve to deliver excellent audio, regardless of where a participant is positioned within the space.

Microphone placement was critical for ensuring the ceiling microphones achieved their potential. Prior to installation, testing took place to determine the correct pickup for each room to guarantee a uniform result in every room.

“By putting those microphones up in the ceiling, people weren’t even aware that there were microphones in the room; not even the architects, which to me was a big win,” Garydavid told Sound & Video Contractor. “Technology doesn’t become the focal point. The meeting room is the focal point to have meetings and conference dates. The technology is just in there to help enable collaboration.”

Devio is the perfect solution for huddle rooms and smaller conferencing spaces.

Devio’s all-in-one design aimed at end users allowed installers to calibrate the system, make precise adjustments to the microphones, and perform other configuration duties without relying on an integrator. “I think that magic was really in the Biamp Devio solution…Devio’s auto calibration just worked really, really well and gave us amazing quality,” said Joey.

Tesira, meanwhile, provided the audio and video capabilities to serve the greater demands of Uber ATG’s larger conference rooms and all-hands spaces. Conversations with the architecture team to ensure that proper acoustical treatments were in place also helped make the reconfigured conferencing spaces as conducive to communication as possible.

By utilizing Devio for small to medium size rooms and Tesira for larger spaces, Uber ATG was able to implement invisible comfort that allowed employees to stop struggling with technology and focus fully on the conversation at hand.