The University of Arizona, Health Science Innovation Building

This 9-story tower known as the Health Sciences Innovation Building (HSIB) at the University of Arizona, Tucson provides classroom systems supporting Zoom conferencing and Panopto recording, a multipurpose presentation and performing arts center, dozens of meeting and huddle spaces, a medical simulation center with recording and debriefing, filming studio and a centralized broadcast booth. What makes the AV system at HSIB so unique is the fact that the entire 9 story building functions as a single system, allowing any signal to be distributed and routed anywhere in the building. The campus systems rely on a robust and dedicated infrastructure of fiber optic cabling and leverages 10-gigabit networks to connect and manage everything. The end users are positioned to tackle any request thrown at them from an event perspective and can record and stream content from basic lecture capture to a professionally produced event on broadcast switchers and production equipment.

This project site of a 9-story newly constructed tower consisting of:

• A performing arts and multi-purpose space called the “Forum”.
• Roughly 17 classrooms ranging from 20 person to 150 person.
• A 30-room standard patient examination training floor.
• A medical simulation “black box” venue for simulating large events and scenarios, including hospital rooms like OR, labor and delivery, Trauma, etc.
• Administrative work space and conference rooms.
• Roughly 70 meeting rooms, debriefing rooms and huddle rooms.
• Centralized broadcast control room interconnected to all AV systems.
• Filming studio for recording and streaming content produced in house.
• Simulation control room for monitoring and controlling various simulations across 2 floors.

We collaborated with the University office of Planning, Design and Construction, various stakeholders from a number of colleges, Biomedical TV production team, the general contractor and other related trades. The project length ran from roughly Jan 2018 – June 2019. One of the major challenges we faced was creating an audiovisual system that installed and operated as a single system. Every audio and video signal needed to be accessible from the broadcast control room for lecture capture, VTC, recording, streaming and centralized control. Additionally, the distances between AV rack rooms necessitated the design and installation of dual fiber-optic backbones for the video, audio and control systems. Typical category cable installation was not an option.

AV System Details

Our design team engineered and deployed dual single-mode fiber optic backbones that fully support the building-wide integrated systems. Therefore, building acts as a single system, with all signals available anywhere as needed. The following lists the items that were utilized to create this system:

• Netgear M4300 10G LAN with 8 switches comprising a stacked 10G core, with roughly 20 edge 10G fiber trunked 1G S3300 switches. The network system is fully redundant with dual fiber trunk ports per edge/stacked switch.
  • VLAN management is in place supporting control, QLAN and Audinate/Dante network segments
  • This network runs a Crestron control network with six (6) 3-series processors.
  • QSC Core 5200 processor runs audio for the building with various QLAN amps and IO distributed throughout.
  • Auxiliary 8-channel wireless microphone cart can patch into any teaching podium via Dante to instantly add more channels of microphones for events requiring more mics.
• The video system is built on an Evertz MMA10G AV-over-IP network, with a core 128-port switch fabric (IPX128) and dual 64-port switch fabrics (IPX64). The hybrid nature of the MMA 10G system where it supports HDMI and HDSDI seamlessly made it perfect for the large number of signals and varying formats needed in classrooms and broadcast studios. The system support hundreds of inputs and outputs, all with imperceptible latency and support for 4k throughout the system. The matrix is fully non-blocking, so any video input can be routed to any destination in the building and through the broadcast system.
• The Forum system consists of multiple presentation modes.
• Large 30:9 aspect drop screen (33’ wide) flanked by rotating custom renkus heinz steerable column arrays for main “TED talk” presentations.
• Dual-sided Absen directview LED video wall flanked by renkus heinz steerable column arrays to support a central presentation stage. The wall retracts from the ceiling on a box truss controlled by an ETC hoist.
  • Allen and Heath dLive audio system with IO boxes able to support any production.
  • Tricaster TC1 for productions and streaming.
• The classroom systems were standardized to create a seamless transition between spaces, and they consist of:
  • Varying number of displays, from 8-projector rooms to single projector rooms.
  • Rooms combine/divide automatically using partition sensors.
  • Teaching stations with access to a PC, laptop connection and Mersive solstice for wireless sharing.
  • Soft codec conferencing form either the PC or laptop. Full integration into the audio systems and dynamic USB routing through Crestron.
  • Sony PTZ cameras
  • Shure ULXD wireless mic systems with Audix and Shure ceiling microphones for lecture capture and conferencing.
  • Tie-in options to a Cisco SX80 codec farm in the central control room.
  • Dual purpose Crestron DM-DGE-200-C graphics engines providing room control and preview monitoring at the teaching stations.
• Active learning style classrooms feature combinable 10/20 screen systems with full routing ability of sources (student tables and instructor) to any/all displays.
• CAE Learning Space medical simulation system with hundreds of PoE endpoints including microphones, speakers, cameras and video encoders. Rooms include a black box room called the “Simdeck” with a Christie 3-projector curved blend for immersive content driven by a Dataton Watchout media server.
  • Access to run a simulation from up to 45 computer locations through CAE simulation software.
  • A dozen debriefing rooms for playback of recorded content.
  • A 10×2 curved video wall in the Simdeck control room, capable of monitoring and controlling any simulation of mannequin vitals in single or 2×2 scaled video mode.
• Centralized broadcast booth consisting of:
  • Three (3) Cisco SX80’s
  • 10 computer workstations with custom Shuttle PC’s and Datapath SDI capture cards. These can stream and record any signal in the building.
  • Dual Tricasters (TC1) with NC1 expanders sharing all inputs over NDI protocol.
  • Zeevee ZyperHD encoders/decoders for integrating existing spaces in legacy buildings.
  • Matrox Monarch and AJA Pro record decks for recording and streaming.
  • Building wide control user interface.
  • Filming studio with camera and audio interface to systems and rigged lighting system and controllers with green screens.

Our team at Level 3 Audio Visual has been an AV integration partner for the University of Arizona on multiple new construction and renovation projects. The University of Arizona sent out a RFP to a select group of AV Integrators for this Design-Assist-Build project. Our team was honored to have been selected as the AV Partner for the state-of-the-art, Health Sciences Innovation Building.