The Meeting Owl Pro is a 360-degree conference camera that not only has a cute Owl-like appearance but is easy to set up and fun to use. The Meeting Owl’s unique design also allows this conference camera to fade into the background of any room or office space decor. It works with Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, and other video conference platforms. Plus it looks like and owl and hoots when it comes online. It’s definitely got more personality than your basic conference call spider.
Owl Labs is the first company to build 360-degree video conferencing solutions for hybrid organizations. Its suite of products makes meetings more inclusive and collaborative by leveling the playing field between remote and in-room participants. The company’s flagship product, the Meeting Owl Pro, is the first WiFi-enabled, 360-degree camera, microphone and speaker that automatically zooms in on whoever’s speaking with the highest quality video on the market. Owl Labs has raised $22 million in funding and is based in Boston, with remote and hybrid employees all over the world.
Meeting Owl Pro captures 360 degrees of video and outputs a split screen that focuses on the current speaker, but still shows the other meeting participants. It’s extremely effective for those calls where you have a group of people at a conference table or in a huddle.
Much like how Zoom will highlight or bring focus to the current speaker in a call, Meeting Owl Pro does the same for a physical meeting space. The device is intelligent enough to know who’s talking and makes them the center of attention.
However, it’s still keeping an eye on activity on the periphery, where there is motion or faces of other participants, it’s keeping those quadrants with activity in the other portions of the screen.
Instead of staring at a packed table and trying to figure out who’s speaking, Meeting Owl Pro does the work for you. And it’s better for those in the meeting room as well. Instead of staring at laptop cameras, people are free to look around and chat normally. It’s a much better, more organic experience. The height of the Meeting Owl Pro is a little taller than most video conference devices, so that it can see above laptop screens.
However if you have a home office and it’s only you in the room, you might be wasting the benefit of the 360 camera, in that you’re showing everyone else the walls around your office instead of other conference participants.
There’s an inherent disconnect between a table full of coworkers and a handful of remote people on the other end of the line. This helps bridge that gap, making conversation flow and making it easier to see the subtle expression shifts and body chemistry that’s often lost when you’re not in the room.
Plus, the eight microphones on the unit normalize volume between speakers, something that’s often the bane of any teleconference. If you’re interested to get The Owl for your office, it retails at $999.
