IE creates WOW Room, an avant-garde space that proposes a futuristic formation

This virtual classroom revolutionizes the way of learning through artificial intelligence, real-time simulations, big data analytics on big screens, interactive robots, emotional recognition systems, presence of experts via holograms and collaboration solutions. An immersive experience in which the line that separates education is marked online of the face-to-face.

WOW Room is a training space that combines the teaching experience of IE Business School with cutting-edge technologies to power the class of the future. With this project, the company is committed to innovation and breaks with the traditional vision of face-to-face training, blended and online.

This immersive initiative revolutionizes the learning experience through artificial intelligence, real-time simulations, big data analytics, interactive robots, emotional recognition systems and presence of experts via holograms, among other resources.

"WOW Room anticipates the formation of the future. This space is another step in our commitment to technological immersion, where real situations in which they will participate are reproduced 100 teachers and more than 1.000 students of 130 countries in the first year. Students will make decisions under pressure. They will face business crises, define production processes in manufacturing environments, negotiate in war scenarios and resolve diplomatic conflicts between countries, among many other cases", explains Diego Alcázar Benjumea, Vice President of IE Business School.

Teachers will be physically present in wow room or projected through a hologram managed by a robot that will move around the room to interact with students. In addition to simulations, teachers will use artificial intelligence, big data analytics on big screens, receive student participation statistics and propose votes on discussion topics to encourage collaboration. All classes will be recorded to allow access and review of the contents.

AV Equipment

WOW Room, acronyms that respond to the concept Window on the World, is a physical space located on the IE campus in Madrid that has 48 Screens Lg of 55 inches without borders that make up a videowall of 45 U-shaped square meters with a view of 230 Degrees. This digital tapestry is divided into three sections of 4 continuous columns integrated each of them by four screens, which makes a total of 16 Displays.

This visual configuration is controlled by a computer equipped with a Quadcore Intel i7 processor, two NVidia GTX cards 1080 paired with SLI and 32 GB of RAM.

The hardware includes two multi-touch screens of 65 Inch, that allow you to manage the virtual whiteboard and control the applications, and cameras that allow the recording and editing of sessions in real time. The teacher enters the system using a Philips X1000 4K camera, mounted on a Pixio automatic tripod base that tracks your movements through class space. For its part, holographic projections are made on a HoloScreen sheet of 2×1 meters.

The WOW Room is also equipped with a 1600W sound infrastructure, integrated by four speakers, installed on the roof, Microphones Sennheiser and a control table.

The lighting system is composed of three programmable RGB spotlights, two motorized RGB ambient lamps and two programmable green lasers.

As for the software, benefits from a SyncRTC video collaboration platform developed ad-hoc for this project in HTML5 and WebRTC, running in three full-screen Chrome windows. WOW Room provides advanced video conferencing solutions that require low levels of bandwidth to ensure effective student engagement across any device and from anywhere in the world.

The classroom can output two 4K video feeds, one from the teacher and one with a full panoramic view. Thanks to multipoint management units in the cloud, based on the open source project Licode of the UPM, the WOW Room receives and broadcasts up to 60 1080p video streams from students anywhere in the world, with a latency lower than 200 Ms.

With this software it is possible to create or edit multimedia documents and applications, with possibilities such as collaborative navigation, office formats, imagery, Videos, interactive maps, virtual screens and an application to make surveys in real time. It is also possible to connect with different social networks.

"WOW Room allows students to connect and work collaboratively from anywhere, even if they have to connect with their mobile from the airport. We use a version of the SyncRTC software designed ad-hoc for this project that allows us to work in real time and provides tools to teachers to optimize the performance of students in each session. At the same time, the system is easy to use and requires minimal technical support to operate", comments Jolanta Gonalowska, Director of Lerning Innovation at IE

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