Silicon Updates: Owl labs launches Meeting Owl for better video conferences

Video conferencing is one of the most glitching experiences to the employees in the IT industry. Often, the employees end up with the conversation of connection verification rather than any productive information exchange. Subjected to solved such video conferencing issues, Owl labs is going to launch a Qualcomm Snapdragon based audiovisual tool called Meeting Owl.

Inspired by the perception abilities of owls, the Meeting Owl was developed mimicking the same capabilities. This is a 11-inch device resembles a feathered owl and its unique feature is to turn its head around - 360 degrees. This device is equipped with 360-degrees fish-eye lenses, speakers and microphones. The microphones of the device are designed to respond and grasp to every corner of the environment. The Meeting Owl is powered by Snapdragon 410 chipset, which can capture 1080 pixel videos with a quad core CPU of 1.2GHz clock speed. Also, it support 802.11 n standards of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1.

The Meeting Owl has a really powerful processor, it’s connected to the internet, and it has high resolution sensors in the microphones and camera. If you’re looking at it as a robot, there are a lot of ways you can combine its features to create new device features. - Owl Labs CTO Mark Schnittman.

The Meeting Owl support video conferencing include the panoramic view of the room along with the close-up views of every single person available in the room. This device is also capable of creating collages from the video it is capturing. The major advantage in hardware perspective is that is can be connected through USB and hence is compatible with every host irrespective of the operating system.

Meeting Owl prototype

The major factors of concern to design the Meeting Owl with Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset are price, form factor and power consumption. The device will connect to the internet through Wi-Fi and will receive OTA updates every month. The Meeting Owl owns a compute vision that helps it to detect the objects and people in the room. It can automatically focus on the person who is speaking.

As Schnittman wrote in a recent Medium post, “Our mission is to help remote participants truly feel included during team meetings because, unfortunately, more often than not they don’t.”

As a plug-and-play video conferencing gadget, Meeting Owl is available at a price $799 and can be availed at Owl Labs page. However, there is no word on the availability of the gadget in India.