Illinois College of Optometry
PRO AV Spotlight Award Winning System Installation

Visual Resources are an Important Part of Illinois College of Optometry's Teaching Process.

The Illinois College of Optometry (ICO) is an institution that teaches individuals to diagnose and correct various medical conditions of the eye and vision, and teaching with visual materials is important in this learning process. With the aid of ICO’s Director of Learning Resources, Gerald Dujsik, the school wanted a modern facility that was easy to use and provided technology that displayed accurately represented images. ICO’s staff of information system (IS) employees, the architectural firm Jensen & Halsted Ltd, Krahl Construction and the various trades, the A/V integrator United Visual, and others aided in the completion of the project on budget and on time.

The ICO project involved many classrooms but the showpiece was on ICO’s Eye Labs. The architect had designed the lab spaces in the form of an eye with space for at least eighteen refracting lanes with LCD monitors. The Audio-Visual installation was created with the scope of creating a managed presentation to all lanes from a lectern at one end of the large lab. Each lane held equipment normally found during an eye exam. Instead of a projected eye chart, an LCD screen displays either the visual acuity charts from a PC hidden below the LCD or the professor’s presentation. It was important for the images to be accurate and clear; therefore, only high-resolution computer video signals were used. The lighting was another important aspect the professors needed control over, and a Leviton based lighting system was used. An AMX system ties together the A/V equipment and lighting. AMX simplifies using the room and is also being remotely monitored by the staff to prevent downtime.

From the custom Marshall Furniture lectern, a professor can display images from a DVD player, document camera, a lectern PC, and varying auxiliary inputs (DVI-D, VGA, Composite, S-Video, and HDMI). All the sources can be seen at the teaching station monitor and each of the LCDs in the lanes. To maintain a sharp DVI-D signal, a Magenta Research Infinea twisted pair video distribution system was used in combination with Extron DVI-D switchers and scalers. A Biamp Nexia audio processor helps manage speech reinforcement with Shure wireless microphones and audio through a Crown amplifier and Extron ceiling speakers. The Magenta Research pieces and the Biamp provides a modern digital A/V system.

To allow a professor to have easy control of the lighting and A/V system, an AMX touch panel based control system is used. The touch panel design was developed loosely following the InfoComm Dashboard protocol. The design ensured ICO’s branding guidelines were also followed. The staff at ICO remotely monitors the AMX control system via the Resource Manager Suite (RMS) web portal; which creates reports on system usage and equipment notifications. The customer has scheduled times to shut down the room and lights when the facility is not in use via the macro capability in RMS. Basically, the A/V control system allows the system to be more “green”; when the system is shut down, devices in the lectern are powered off.

While the final product is a complex but very simple to use A/V system, the install had its share of issues. One of the issues dealt with integrating the various combinations of the different computer graphics cards present in the different lectern computers. Since the introduction of digital video signals, managing the compatibility of signals and devices has become more of an issue. The EDID (Extended Display Identification Data) signal was not always being passed, and the lectern PC refused to clone itself to the lanes. To fix the problem a Gefen DVI Detective Plus was introduced. It allowed the capture of EDID information at a single LCD monitor, and when connected back to the PC, the PC received continuous EDID data that allowed the desktop image to be displayed on all LCDs. The IS staff aided by configuring the PCs and allocating network space for the A/V equipment.

Throughout the entire project working closely with the architectural firm, the various trades, ICO’s IS staff, and the customer were essential for success. If a conduit needed to be repositioned, lighting configuration needed changing, or certain network access be granted, the correct person needed to be addressed. The final product was a detailed collaboration between the architects and their allowance of A/V technology, A/V Integrator, construction crew, and especially the customer. Today the client is using the room every day, and the technology allows professors to comfortably and reliably help teach our future eye doctors.