Neat, a new certified partner for Microsoft Teams Rooms

Norway based Video device company Neat announced today they would be producing Microsoft Teams Rooms.

This is interesting as Neat launched specifically for Zoom, with their website saying “Neat was created to give Zoom users the ultimate Zoom Rooms experience”.

Zoom even directly invested with a minority stake in Neat and launched them at Zoom CEO Eric Yuan’s keynote at Zoomtopia 2019, the company’s annual user conference.

Over time, all Neat devices will natively support Teams, beginning calendar Q4 2021. Running Microsoft Teams Rooms for Android.

• Neat board – the smartboard left on the picture below
• Neat Bar Pro, the larger video bar
• Neat Bar, the shorter video bar
• Neat One, a personal video bar
• The controller for the bars
• Neat Frame, the vertical aligned personal device will run Microsoft Teams display
• Neat Pad, a tablet-sized device that can act as a scheduling display outside of a room, for tasks like booking, bottom right, that will presumably run Microsoft Teams Panels

 

The Neat Frame

 

A big innovation here seems to be framing in-room participants individually and, from the marketing mock-ups, it looks like present them to teams as individual video feeds (not as one video feed with multiple people framed), meaning they will render in an appropriate layout on the other devices joining the meeting.

I do hope I’m not being too trusting of the marketing images and these really are separate videos feeds for each framed room participant.

Neat call this framing feature Neat Symmetry, using AI with high-resolution sensors to focus in and individually auto frame each in-room participant.

From the Microsoft blog, it looks like this ability to send in multiple frames participants will be unlocked for all device vendors, not just Neat, if the device vendors can do it. For example, the Microsoft blog shows the new Poly Studio E70 doing the same thing