Empowering collaboration in the hybrid workplace with Surface Hub 2S and Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera
As hybrid work continues to evolve, it is imperative that organizations bring people together wherever they are – both inside the office and out – to communicate, collaborate and co-create.
For years, Microsoft has invested in hardware and software solutions to meet emerging customer needs. Years ago, we envisioned a concept we referred to as the “magic window,” a suite of technologies and techniques, which, at its simplest form, was about connecting people and removing barriers of geography and communication style. With Surface Hub 2S, our customers experience this vision – collaborating using Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Whiteboard, Windows and more. Today we are proud to announce updates to Surface Hub 2S that make this experience even better. We’re also excited to introduce the new Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera.
Work together anywhere
Whether through Teams, Whiteboard or first-rate inking with Surface Hub 2 Pen, Surface Hub 2S provides a variety of features and capabilities to address these needs. With the new Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera, the meeting experience becomes even more immersive for people both in the room and participating remotely. With its automatic framing technology, portable design and high-quality video the Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera helps to ensure participants are seen and heard – whether they are at the back of a large room or interacting with the Surface Hub at the edge of the screen.
More inclusive connections
If you’ve noticed the clarity of Surface Laptop and Surface Pro’s microphones, the smoothness of digital inking or the capabilities of Surface’s front-facing cameras, then you understand the pride we take in our work. As the conference room whiteboard was once the gathering place for creative teams, Surface Hub – with touch, digital inking and companion software experiences – raises that bar for hybrid and remote teams. As the trend toward hybrid work accelerates, we have set our sights on improving the experience, pushing further in ways that limit tradeoffs for remote participants and promote equity of experience. Think about the traditional hybrid meeting experience where a single camera fails to clearly capture who is speaking and what else might be happening in the room. This was an opportunity for further innovation across signal processing, artificial intelligence (AI) and optics to build a camera capable of improving the experience and extending the benefits of Surface Hub to those not physically in the room. Allow me to introduce the Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera.
Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera is more than a professional grade camera. It is the first AI-powered camera from Microsoft. Surface Hub 2 Camera reframes, adjusts lighting and enables incredibly wide angles of view, all without any warping, distortions or depth-of-field issues that might otherwise limit what is visible. The team put tremendous work into tuning the experience to capture and frame what is occurring in the room while being smooth and natural for remote viewers or participants. Whether someone leaves the room, enters or walks up to interact with the display, everyone in the room is in view and in focus. This is possible through a combination of technologies working together:
- A 12-megapixel sensor, with a stellar 136-degree field of view lens that can keep things near (.4m) and far (8m) simultaneously in crisp focus across a wide variety conference room sizes and configurations
- 1 Teraflop of compute power (a trillion floating point calculations per second)
- A new algorithm we developed to automatically compensate for tilt, distortions and wide-angle corrections so object appear as they would in real life
- AI that can detect people across a variety of postures, lighting conditions and rooms, ensuring every participant is equally visible
All of this is housed in a beautifully machined aluminum body, connected with a USB-C mount and attached with a simple magnetic click. Learn more about managing and installing the Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera on our documentation page.Meeting and collaboration for hybrid teamsCollaborate better together
Across the Surface portfolio, we pride ourselves on delivering the best of Microsoft. Surface Hub 2S is no exception. As hybrid meetings overtook more traditional meeting settings, we saw solutions like Surface Hub play a unique and powerful role. People needed the ability to co-create in an ad hoc fashion and build on the work of peers spread across a variety of locations and environments. Through the powerful combination of software that comes to life on Surface Hub, organizations could navigate such challenges. We’ve been working to bring the latest Microsoft experiences built for hybrid work across Teams, Microsoft 365, Windows and Whiteboard to Surface Hub 2S, Surface Laptop and Surface Pro. Let’s look at a few software innovations that make hybrid work more agile.
- We have made it even easier for all participants to co-create in a Whiteboard session that includes a Surface Hub. The UI that previously was optimized for Whiteboard screen-sharing has been updated to share a Whiteboard session from within a Teams meeting where each participant has automatic access to edit.
- Outlook will now allow you to RSVP to meetings and note whether you plan to appear in-person at the meeting or virtually.
- Enhancements to the companion device experience will make it easier and less distracting to join a hybrid meeting from within a conference room.
- Whiteboard now offers a rich set of capabilities that bring visual collaboration to life in Teams, including collaboration cursors, more than 50 new templates, contextual reactions and the ability to open existing boards and collaborate with external colleagues in Teams Meetings.
- Coming soon to PowerPoint, you no longer need to appear in person to deliver your message effectively. With recording studio and cameo in PowerPoint, you can create your own presentation, decide how and where you appear on your slides with cameo, record it and have the presentation delivered with, or without you, via PowerPoint Live in Teams.
- Fluent emojis in Teams allow you to bring your personality to the conversation. With new and vibrant styling, 3D Fluent emojis will infuse expression and playfulness into every message. Select a category to easily find the emoji you want and use the skin tone selector to pick an emoji that better represents you.
Learn more about these and other innovations on the M365 blog.
Hybrid work is here, but so are tools like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Whiteboard and more that come to life on Surface. Through this intentional mix of innovative hardware and software, hybrid work does not have to be a disruption.
The Surface team has been on a mission to bring people together – whether they are in the same room, or worlds apart. We designed Surface Hub to be upgradable, modular, and flexible to change with the times and technology. These updates to both hardware and software demonstrate the ongoing benefits available to our Surface Hub 2S customers, and we hope they help to draw teams a little bit closer.
Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera is available March 16 in all markets where Surface Hub is sold for MSRP $799.99. Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera will be sold with Surface Hub 2s 85” beginning May 31 for MSRP $21,999.99.
Check out the Microsoft Surface for Business page to learn more, or contact an authorized Microsoft Surface reseller through the Where to Buy page. For information on Teams certified accessories from Microsoft, check out the accessories page.
Source: Empowering collaboration in the hybrid workplace with Surface Hub 2S and Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera
