The Meeting Owl

Meeting Owl is the original 360° smart video conferencing camera. It automatically highlights and shifts focus to different people in the room when they speak, so you know what's happening as if you're there. It combines mic, camera and speaker into one device and sits in the center of the table.

Meeting Owl is a matte-black smart-speaker-style device standing 273mm tall with a maximum diameter of 111mm. It weighs 1.2kg and tapers slightly towards the single-lens 360-degree camera at the top. The product's distinctive appearance derives from a beak-like extension of the camera surround, which is flanked by a pair of eye-like status lights that pulse on boot-up and glow solid when the device is streaming video. It's a striking design, but Meeting Owl can look just a little bit sinister in a dimly lit room.

There are two connectors in the base, for power via a 12V/3A AC adapter and PC connection via a Micro-USB to USB cable (both supplied in the box). Buttons on opposite sides of the device mute the audio, whereupon red status strip-lights appear near the base and a muted-microphone icon appears on-screen. You also get volume up/down buttons and an 'owl' button that toggles between two onscreen speaker-spotlight modes -- sliding animation or straight cuts.

Meeting Owl works with Windows 7 or higher, OS X 10.8 or higher, Linux 2.6.26 or higher, and Chrome OS. We tested it successfully with Windows 10 and OS X 10.10.5, using Google Hangouts and Skype. Other fully supported videoconferencing platforms are Google Meet, Go To Meeting, Skype for Business, and Zoom. Among the 'not recommended' platforms are Adobe Connect, FaceTime, Microsoft Teams, Teamviewer, and WeChat (see Owl Labs' website for more detail on platform support). To set up Meeting Owl, you first need to download the free Android or iOS app and connect to the device via Bluetooth. From here you can focus and lock the camera on a presenter or on any important area of the room, connect the Meeting Owl to wi-fi to receive automatic feature updates, and get an extended warranty when you register your Owl. You can also set a passcode to restrict access to the Owl's settings.

The wi-fi connection doesn't carry any audio/video information, but does send usage data to Owl Labs -- when a meeting occurs, duration of audio/video streaming, the number of people in each meeting, plus diagnostic data. You can see meeting analytics information for your Meeting Owls in the iOS app or via a browser, but it's not yet available in the Android app. Meeting Owl is designed for meeting rooms up to 17ft by 13ft by 10ft, holding up to 12 people. For best video performance it's recommended that participants sit within six feet of the 360-degree camera, while audio performance is good for up to 12 feet away.

The video camera is a custom single-lens 16MP unit with a native resolution of 3,456 x 3,456 pixels. That information is processed by the Meeting Owl's firmware -- which runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 platform -- to produce a panoramic view of the meeting room at the top of display and a 'stage' below that intelligently highlights the current speaker and up to two other participants. The resolution of the panorama and stage is 1,280 by 720 pixels (720p) at 30 frames per second (fps). The Owl has an eight-microphone array to capture 360-degree wideband audio within a 3.6m (12 foot) range with acoustic echo cancellation. The 360-degree speaker outputs at 90dB SPL.