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MillimeterVideo Phone
Sep 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
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Conceived during the telco boom, Sprint Experience morphs sales, brand marketing, and AV/IT showmanship into a modern vision of corporate communications.
 With 12 Sony projectors driving 360-degree presentations, the rotunda is the centerpiece of Sprint Experience on the company’s new World Headquarters Campus. Photos: Troy Thomas/Sprint VCC. |
66251. That's the zip code for Sprint's recently completed World Headquarters Campus in suburban Kansas City. Situated on 240 acres of native prairie grasses and wildflowers, the state-of-the-art campus is home to 21 buildings totaling 4 million square feet of office space. Modern amenities include a 71,000-square-foot fitness center, a 3,000-seat amphitheater, various dining facilities, a dry cleaner, a flower shop, and an employee pharmacy. If the 14,300 employees who work at the campus were to take up permanent residence there, it would be the 27th most populous city in Kansas.
Construction on the campus, which cost as much as $1 billion according to some local media reports, began in 1997 at the height of a telecommunications explosion that had Sprint spilling out of its previous headquarters into more than 60 locations throughout metropolitan Kansas City. Employees began relocating to the campus on July 19, 1999, and the consolidation was complete in August 2002. However, construction wasn't fully complete until the campus' capstone, a 20,000-square-foot A/V wonderland known as Sprint Experience, was unveiled.
Sprint Experience is a briefing center where Sprint's sales force can showcase the company's voice and data networking products and services to potential enterprise customers. The company operates four similar facilities across the United States — Atlanta, Dallas, Falls Church/DC, Bay Area/SF — the first of which was opened in 1989 in Atlanta.
Stewart Patt, Sprint's director of executive briefing centers and trade shows, says the briefing centers serve two purposes. “One, they give customers confidence that Sprint is in it for the long haul. You look at these facilities and you go, ‘This company is going to be here and it's committed to the enterprise space,’” he says. “Two, it allows the customers to actually see the products and services in action. It's one thing for us to sit in front of them at their office and talk to them about our IP backbone. It's a totally different ballgame when we show them how video over IP or IP telephony works on our backbone over a live network.”
 The Sony VPL-FE110 SXGA projectors fit snugly in the 12’x5’ projection rooms behind the screens in the conference rooms. |
Last year, more than 1,400 events were held in Sprint's five briefing centers, including one across town that was closed with the move to the new campus. Patt says those events generated $900 million in closed-contract revenue. “We can't take credit for all of that revenue, but we measure dollars after a customer comes through one of the centers, and we close the sale with that customer,” he says. “Over the last couple of years an average of about 70 percent of the visitors increased their purchase amount as the result of a visit to a briefing center. On average, the increase of each purchase was about 40 percent.”
This year, Patt expects the briefing centers to be an important source of new revenue generation, in part because of the new showcase center at the new campus. And revenue will likely jump again next year, when Patt expects the new center to host two to three events a day, 10 to 15 a week, and as many as 700 a year — half of the total number of events held in 2002 at all five briefing centers.
Originally envisioned in 1995 when the Sprint campus idea was first considered, the new briefing center has been in the planning and construction phase for two and a half years. Several groups within Sprint had a say in the briefing center's design, which is in keeping with the company's “One Sprint” philosophy. Trip Meade, group manager in Sprint's brand management division, was one of the key players in the process. “We have a very collaborative, consensus-building structure at Sprint,” he says. “The center is a physical manifestation of the Sprint brand, so it was very important for several business units to be involved.”
In addition to input from various divisions within Sprint, several outside vendors also contributed to the process. The result is the company's most ambitious briefing center. While all five of the company's centers have A/V routing, the campus facility is the first to feature high-definition video, which is displayed in four distinctive areas.
 On the 16:9 Da-Lite projection screens in the two larger conference rooms, presenters can display two 4:3 images side by side, or go full-screen with their choice of four high-def videos produced specifically for Sprint Experience. |
When potential clients first enter Sprint Experience, they pass through automatic glass doors that open into an austere environment that belies the technology at work under the surface. To the right, one of the center's seven full-time employees greets visitors at a reception desk featuring the latest-generation PCS phones, which visitors are free to use during their visit.
A guided tour of the facility typically begins in the reception area with an informal welcome speech from one of Sprint's top executives. During the first week of operation, both Gary Forsee, Sprint's new chairman and CEO, Len Lauer, president and COO of the corporation and president of the wireless PCS division, and Howard Janzen, president of the company's global markets group, were frequent speakers at the briefing center.
After the short welcome, visiting groups move from the reception area to one of three conference rooms, where a product manager and other Sprint representatives deliver a presentation targeted at the prospect's enterprise needs. With wood-paneled walls and large, horseshoe-shaped conference tables, the briefing rooms have a very corporate look and feel. And yet, this is where the A/V comes to life for the first time.
Working with Sprint's design team and the campus' architects, all of the A/V equipment inside Sprint Experience was specified and installed by AVI Systems, a systems integrator based in Kansas City and Minneapolis. AVI also outfitted the rest of Sprint campus with A/V equipment, making the project the largest in AVI's 30-year history. As many as 15 AVI employees worked on the project at various times, and one technician continues to work at the campus full-time to service the equipment.
Although AVI installed video projectors in more than 200 conference rooms across the campus, the ones installed in the conference rooms in Sprint Experience are different. Because of Sprint's desire to maintain the look and feel of the rest of the campus, all of the A/V equipment in the briefing center conference rooms is very discreet.
Everything in the three rooms — two of which can accommodate 25 people and the third, 20 — is Crestron-controlled. Each room features a Crestron Pro II control system and a TPS-6000 15in. control interface. From the interface, which sits in an alcove on the side of each room and can be remotely controlled, the presenter can manipulate all of the audio and video sources, as well as the drapes, sheers, and lights.
 Three customer testimonials are presented high-def on plasma displays along the 150ft. media wall. The videos are activated by a specially designed touch-screen interface to the left of each plasma panel. |
The focal point of each room is a 16:9 Da-Lite projection screen encased in wood at the front of the room. Behind the screen in a 12'×5' room, a Sony VPL-FE110 4000-lumen SXGA projector is mounted alongside various Extron converters and transmitters. The projectors are driven by a high-definition server more than 400ft. away in a central control room. On the server, there are four HD videos created specifically for the briefing center.
In a concealed cabinet next to the projection screen, presenters have access to a Sony DVP-NS715P progressive scan DVD player, a Wolfvision VZ-8plus document camera, and an extra laptop for PowerPoint presentations. The rooms also feature full surround sound, as well as IP-based videoconferencing systems with ceiling-mounted Sony SNC-RZ30N PTZ single-CCD cameras.
Although most presentations are driven from each room's primary laptop with a remote, Meade says the conference rooms are designed to accommodate a variety of scenarios. “We have the ability to take the Crestron interface and drop it either on the desk or on the wall,” he says. “We have the ability to plug in a client laptop. We have a document camera to project and show customers how access to email works instead of having everyone crowd around a phone. We can also pull up any high-def content, and we have IP-based cameras throughout for videoconferencing.”
After hearing and seeing Sprint's pitch in one of the conference rooms, visitors move back out into the reception area, where they may have the chance to interact with other potential clients visiting the briefing center, which can accommodate up to three groups at a time. They can also view information about Sprint's existing customers via an interactive 150ft. media wall.
In addition to static graphics that describe a variety of Sprint's customer applications, the media wall features three testimonial videos presented on three Sony PFM-42B1 42in. plasma display screens and triggered by a specially designed touch-panel interface. To help develop the media wall concept, Sprint hired Imagination (USA) Inc., a creative consultant company founded in London 25 years ago. The firm specializes in experiential marketing and previously designed the market opening ceremony for the NASDAQ stock market.
Eduardo A. Braniff, content director at Imagination (USA) Inc.'s New York offices, headed Imagination's team that worked with Sprint's video production department to storyboard, co-direct, and co-produce the three videos, which were edited by Sprint's production team with HD equipment purchased specifically for this project. The videos profile customers in three of Sprint's most important vertical markets — corporate, education, and government.
 The master control room of Sprint Experience serves the four HD videos presented in the briefing center. |
“The media wall is an opportunity for prospects to interact with their future peer groups,” Braniff says. “We establish the ‘place’ for Sprint Experience in a brochure we send out before visitors arrive that describes the Sprint campus and the company's place in Kansas City. Then we establish the day's ‘program’ in the conference rooms, where experts get into the nitty-gritty of the products and services they might be interested in. And next we show them their ‘peers’ on the media wall.”
Imagination developed the style and tone of the videos, and then co-produced with Sprint's production department to get the videos shot at each of the three client locations beginning in September 2002. More than 900 minutes were shot with Sprint's Sony HDW-750 1080i HDCAM camera, and then edited at Sprint headquarters on two Avid DS systems that were upgraded to HD for the project. “We knew that we wanted to get into HD production, so when the opportunity presented itself we purchased the HD equipment,” says Tom McAnerney, a Sprint video producer (in Sprint's Visual Communcations Center) who co-produced and oversaw production of the high-definition media for the space.
The crown jewel of Sprint Experience sits at the end of the media wall. The rotunda is a 360-degree, high-definition theater where visitors learn about Sprint's enterprise products, and even get to see them in action. In contrast to the austere conference rooms, the rotunda oozes with technology. “Having established the ‘program’ and the ‘peers,’ you move into the rotunda, which is really about showcasing the ‘products’ and using different technologies to allow visitors to interact with the products,” Braniff says.
From a column in the center of the circular room, 12 Sony VPL-FE110 SXGA projectors direct light onto the 12 curved screens that make up the rooms outer walls. The images are a combination of graphics that Imagination artists created in After Effects and existing material from PowerPoint presentations. “We didn't create any new info for the rotunda,” Meade says. “The information was already there. But when we presented it before it was on one-screen PowerPoint slides. We took the same info and jazzed it up for the 12 screens.”
Although the three high-def testimonial videos aren't part of the normal presentation in the rotunda, they can be accessed from the Sony HD server via another Crestron CNMSX-Pro II control system. All of the video and graphics are accompanied by 12 channels of surround sound output from 40 speakers throughout the room. The rotunda is also equipped with videoconferencing equipment and the ability to do live look-ins at Sprint technical facilities around the country. The servers running the IP-based videoconferences are humming and blinking just outside the rotunda.
“Our customers actually want to see the gear that's driving all the demos, so everything we're doing is on a live network,” Patt says. “There's no smoke and mirrors.”
The installation of the A/V equipment in the round rotunda presented several challenges for systems integrator AVI. The first challenge was finding room to mount the presentation equipment in the ceiling.
“We had 12 video projectors, videoconferencing cameras, mics, and speakers, not to mention the HVAC, power, lights, and some plumbing. It's packed up there,” says Joe Nickell, who headed up the integration for AVI. “Many of the locations were critical so everything was planned in advance. We had a blueprint of the rotunda and all of the different trades added their equipment one by one. Typically, fire protection will come in early and put in their sprinkler heads, and if we needed to move a speaker 3ft. to accommodate them we'd do that. But there wasn't room to move the speakers in this case so everything was planned in advance.”
Nickell says all of the video and RGB signals for the floor came in via CAT-5 through the ceiling, down the center column, and into nine boxes in the floor, which was raised less than 2in., making for another tight squeeze. The cabling in the floor runs to six more projectors, which are mounted inside six of the 12 plinths in the room. While all of the plinths are lighted from the inside, the six with projectors can also display graphics and images.
What looked to be the most challenging installation obstacle actually worked itself out on its own. Nickell says he was considering using high-end graphic workstations to warp the projected images onto the 12 rounded screens — until he made a call to Folsom Research 18 months ago. “It was a complete coincidence that they were working on a warp processor that they said they were thinking about introducing this year,” he says. “We used some of the first prototypes of the VMS-1000, which Folsom eventually introduced at InfoComm this year. The rotunda would have happened even if they didn't come out with it, but it made the images look a lot better and did it for probably 1/10 the cost of using earlier technology.”
After the impressive display of technology in the rotunda, the final stop at Sprint Experience is a lounge area where the familiar wood paneling and discreet A/V systems resurface. Here, visitors watch a 3-minute closing video narrated by Sprint CEO Gary Forsee. Like the testimonial videos, the closing video was scripted by Imagination and produced by Sprint's internal production department.
“To wrap up the day, we show a 3-minute promise to our potential customers,” Patt says. “After they watch it, we talk about whether we hit all the hot buttons and what the next step is. We're hoping to get them to sign a contract at that point. If they don't, we'll take it to them next week to sign.”
Former Video Systems Managing Editor Cody Holt researched and contributed to this story.
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