Control rooms aren’t just for rocket scientists. The principles can help any team and be used in any Igloo workspace. 

We're all familiar with the iconic control room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where NASA scientists guided the first astronauts to the moon in 1969. Over 50 years later, the function of the control room – a space for visualising data and making critical decisions – remains much the same, albeit with some major technological advancements.  

At Igloo we’re always looking to gather inspiration from control room designers past and present, because the theories that guide control room design also influence our approach to building immersive spaces.  

Over the years we’ve seen more and more demand from companies looking for better tools to visualise data and collaborate across multiple applications. And we’ve developed our technology so that clients can turn any meeting room into an immersive space and apply the principles of the control room to visualise any content and work faster and better across a range of tasks. 

See better

Today’s organisations make decisions based on large amounts of information, work with many digital tools, and publish content in many different formats. The best control rooms make it possible to represent this information side-by-side, in multiple configurations, giving teams enhanced perspective on complex problems and allowing them to see the impact of decisions in the short, medium and long term across multiple verticals.

At Igloo we call this info-presence. It’s something we have written about in depth and the concept is a guiding principle behind the design of our immersive spaces and our software platform, Igloo Core Engine (ICE).

Igloo Core Engine (ICE) is the operating system for immersive spaces that can power any content on any display, meaning teams can customise meeting spaces to meet their needs and view immersive and traditional content across LED panels, inside an immersive room or in a 360° cylinder.

See together

Employees who occupy shared spaces benefit from collective focus, improved communication and more equal representation. Teams generally come together to collaborate when individual workflows reach a bottleneck and multiple perspectives are required to make progress on a project. Brilliant visualisation tools are worth little if an immersive space fails to foster communication and the synergistic thought that complex problems require.

Our shared immersive spaces are built to enhance both in-person and hybrid collaboration, ensuring the presence of every team member is felt and valued. Thanks to our integrations with the leading video conferencing platforms, you can easily bring remote team members into the heart of the room. And, because the content is surrounding you, they can easily see whatever is being worked on or discussed.

See everything

Traditionally, control rooms have been used for complex, data-led command operations that rely on real-time thinking and decision-making. Think a ship’s bridge, a power grid, or even a recording studio. But the flexibility of modern immersive technology means this no longer needs to be the case.

AEC is one sector that is adopting the control room approach across the lifecycle of building, infrastructure and manufacturing projects. Igloo technology is ideal for AEC control rooms such as the Lava Labs owned by design, engineering and project-managing consultancy SNC Lavalin. The teams use their immersive rooms as a ‘mission control’ to go on virtual site visits and visualise digital twins, whilst also displaying a range of other project-critical data and content when working on design and engineering projects.

At Igloo, our immersive workspaces are as important for making major strategic decisions around finances and business strategy as they are for the day-to-day operations of the company. Our graphics teams meet in the immersive room to compare designs they are working on. Our project managers use it to plan upcoming installations. We even use it as a tool to make decisions on who to hire.

This is because when the control room approach is applied across tasks, the gains made quickly stack up, giving us and our clients an advantage over competitors who rely on traditional meeting room technology.

If you’re looking to create a control room or want to find out how an immersive control room approach can benefit your organisation, get in touch with our experts to learn more.

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