IE crea WOW Room, an avant-garde space that proposes a futuristic training

This virtual classroom revolutionizes the way of learning through artificial intelligence, real time simulations, big data analysis on big screens, interactive robots, emotional recognition systems, presence of experts via holograms and collaboration solutions. An immersive experience that marks the line between education 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 drive 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 y online.

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

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

Teachers will be physically present in the WOW Room or projected through a hologram managed by a robot that will move around the room to interact with students.. In addition to the simulations, teachers will use artificial intelligence, big data analysis on big screens, will receive student participation statistics and propose votes on discussion topics to encourage collaboration. All classes will be recorded to enable 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 video wall of 45 square meters in the shape of a 'U' with a view of 230 degrees. This digital tapestry is divided into three sections of 4 continuous columns each integrated 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 65 inches, that allow you to manage the virtual whiteboard and control the applications, and cameras that allow 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 follows your movements through the classroom space. For your part, Holographic projections are made on a 2x1 meter HoloScreen sheet.

The WOW Room classroom is also equipped with a 1600W sound infrastructure, composed of four speakers, installed on the ceiling, microphones Sennheiser and a control table.

The lighting system is made up of three programmable RGB spotlights, two motorized RGB mood lamps and two programmable green lasers.

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

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

With this software it is possible to create or edit multimedia documents and applications, with possibilities such as collaborative navigation, ophimatic formats, images, videos, interactive maps, virtual screens and an application to take 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 SyncRTC software designed ad-hoc for this project that allows us to work in real time and provides tools to teachers to optimize student performance in each session.. At the same time, The system is easy to use and requires minimal technical support to operate”, comment Jolanta Gonalowska, Directora de Lerning Innovation de IE

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