ALLSA Congress

Description:

A three day international medical conference for health care professionals at the Vineyard Hotel in Newlands, hosted by the Allergy Society of South Africa.

The challenge:

Provide sound and projection screens for 170 people. The international faculty will bring their multimedia presentations on usb sticks or on their own laptops which could be Apple Mac or laptop. Strict time keeping must be adhered to and the plenary room must be set up in a way that allows the room to be split into two for parallel sessions, with minimal  time  delay.

The response:

Considering that the conference venue had to be split and that the room was long and narrow, we setup a four speaker P.A, two front projection screens with a stage between them and two control points on opposite sides of the room. This enabled us to run the  rooms independently during the breakaway sessions and as one room for the plenary sessions by simply opening or closing the room dividers and re-routing a few signal cables. The entire process of splitting or combining the rooms happened in a matter of minutes and delegates were surprised to find that the room configuration changed completely when they returned from their comfort break.

We had stationary cord microphones at the podium and the top table in addition to lapel microphones, for the presenters who preferred to be mobile, and hand held microphones for questions from the audience. Time keeping was managed by a large LED timer at the back of the room, setup in such a way that the presenter and the chairman could see how much time was left for the talk.

Presentations were loaded on a laptop at the back of the room before and during sessions and transferred across the network to the presentation laptop without interrupting or delaying the proceedings in the room. Provision was made for presenters to connect their personal laptops or MacBooks to our projection and sound system, if required.

In order to save floor space and accommodate all the delegates, the projectors were fitted with long throw lenses and placed on high rise stands in the back of the room. The two screens in the plenary room presented a challenge for presenters to point to both screens simultaneously. The solution was a touch screen reference monitor that enabled the presenter to point on the touch screen with his/her finger and a corresponding mouse cursor appeared on both projection screens, showing the audience what the presenter was highlighting.

The result was a highly organized and successful event.