Virgin Atlantic - Clubhouse, Heathrow

This Heathrow Clubhouse project by Avensys has won the coveted Crestron Commercial Integration Awards 2011: Best Hotel and Leisure Project.

The Award was announced at the xSolutions Business Communications Technology Event at London's Excel and was presented by Robin van Meeuwen, VP of Sales & Marketing at Crestron International.

Systems integrator Avensys has completed an upgrade to the audio visual systems at Virgin Atlantics upper class lounge at Heathrow airport in London including a full HD video distribution system.

The lounge in any airport acts not only as an oasis in the madness of tourist travel, but also as a brand statement for the airline. It must also provide a location for business travellers to work, and stay connected with the wider world. Virgins Upperclass clubhouse at Heathrow Terminal 3 in London is no exception, and has always delivered a high standard of audio visual facility. To keep pace with changing technology, the lounge recently underwent a refurbishment encompassing a new HD video system to accompany a new 15 screen video wall.

The lounge features 6 distinct areas, and it interior décor is designed to make it feel like a private members club. There is an observation deck, gallery, roof garden and a sofa lounge (equipped with Wifi, power and data ports, PC’s) as well as a 14 meter long cocktail bar. The new multiscreen area allows waiting passengers to watch movies, sports news and other TV programmes in high definition. The refurbished system replaces the Barco projection setup with a 5x3 video wall made up of 46” Samsung 460-UTN2 LCD monitors. These are supported on a unicol mounting solution, but since the system is considerably heavier (weighing nearly half a ton) than the projection arrangement it replaces Avensys had to do some additional engineering.

The in house team designed and built a new structure that would bear the 500KG weight of the screens, and provided more fixing points with which to attach the brackets. Whilst this installation work was being carried out, Avensys also installed a temporary viewing solution. This took the form of 3 50” displays mounted in front of a floor to ceiling drape to conceal the work area. In addition to the main video wall, Avensys upgraded all the other display oin the facility, installing Samsung LCD screens of various sizes, all likewise mounted on Unicol brackets.

The highlight of the installation is the introduction of a Crestron Digital Media 8G system to distribute the HD content to the video wall and secondary screens. A DM-MD16x16 media switcher was used as the hub of the system, taking content from six sky hd boxes and five bulray players. These signals are distributed over an Crestron 8G cable network to DM-RMC-100-C receivers attached to the displays. For the video wall a slightly different arrangement is used however. The 15 displays show four separate images, one on a 3x3 section, 1 on a 2x2 section and two on single screen sections. The single screens are served by a receiver unit each.
The feeds for multiscreen images are delivered foisrt to a Kramer distribution amplifier. The 3x3 section is served by a Kramer VM-16H, and the 2x2 section with a VM-4Hxl. These units required to get around HDCP issues with the Samsung displays used on the video wall – they are not capable of daisy chaining HDCP content.

The Crestron Digital Media switcher is controlled by an AV2 control processor, and Avensys also supplied a TPMC-15V panel. This features a completely redesigned interface as one of the complaints about the existing system was that the GUI was to complex. The Avensys programmer came up with a solution that minimised the amount of pages, keeping the user as familiar with the device.

An iPad was also introduced, using the Creston Mobile-G Pro app. This allows staff to walk to any location within the lounge and make changes to meet customer requests, such as audio or video adjustments.

Avensys encountered some other challenges during the refurbishment process, as outlined by Alex Williams, Projects manager at Avensys: “we were tasked with resolving an issue that had long been a problem when making an announcement. The audio was very distorted and volume levels were not balanced across the lounge.

“After some calibration of existing equipment, Avensys’ audio engineers were able to produce crystal clear vocals from any announcement, and the staff seemed amazed by how a little playing around of existing equipment, how much better the system sounded.

“Another challenge that presented itself was that the Clubhouse needed to have uninterrupted music and announcements in all areas. This made it difficult to migrate from the existing audio volume controller to the new Kramer one. Avensys worked throughout many of the nights in order to minimise the disruption to Clubhouse guests, and as a result, converted to the new system without a single raised eyebrow.

“Afterwards, our staff liaiased with Virgin to ensure that everyone of the 19 audio zones had the correct volume settings for busy, medium and quiet presets. With the addition of a second microphone in the salon, any announcements can be heard in every area”.

Making use of the 8G system presented some additional design challenges to Avensys. There is a maximum cable run length of 100m permitted, and the VAA Clubhouse had no access hatches in the ceiling – the designers felt that these would detract from the aesthetics. Cables therefore have to run around the edges of the suite. Once cable run reached a length of 99.7m.

Audio for the lunge is fed predominantly by two new Sunflower music servers, which are updated with new music on a daily basis. They also have scheduled mood chages to compliment the times of day when the lunge may be quiet or very busy. When in the cinema zone, customers can plug in to the headphone stations and tune in to any of the content that is being displayed on 5 screen, 4 image media wall.

For Virgin Atlantic’s IT operations manager, Darrell Etherington, the project has been a huge success. “Our Cloubhouse passengers expect a top-class service on all levels”, he says. “With the new media wall and other HD displays we have achieved that.”