ABOUT THE INSTALL
London Metropolitan University came in to existence in 2002, with the merger of the University of North London and the London Guildhall University. In 2006, as part of an ambitious programme to make the institution a leading choice for science students, London Metropolitan University invested more than £30 million developing a state-of-the-art Science Centre. At the time, the ‘Superlab’ as it has become known, achieved a host of firsts. It was the first open plan laboratory that offered the whole range of science to be carried out simultaneously at 280 work stations, the first educational lab to use advanced AV technology as a central part of teaching and learning, on its completion was the largest single UK investment in science education.

THE CHALLENGE
en years after its construction and in order to maintain the excellent standards it had set, the University addressed issues surrounding the Superlab’s legacy technology, which had over time, become less than fit for purpose and somewhat unreliable, with many elements of the system simply no longer serviceable, and as a result, very often unavailable.

THE SOLUTION
Given that science experiments would be at the heart of the content, there could be no room for anything less than crystal clear video. It was determined that an AV over IP system was the way to proceed. WyreStorm’s NetworkHD 400 Series was selected to carry signals from the source units and encode them to JPEG2000 data streams. These streams are transmitted through the existing Cat5 infrastructure to 268x WyreStorm decoders assigned to each of the displays located at the student work stations.