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There are an awful lot of cool choices for video conferencing these days–arguably too many, especially when considering how burnt out on video conferences everyone is. But while the market is saturated with your standard talking-heads-on-a-screen fare, there hasn’t been much in the way of support for hybrid work–until now.
Around 2.0 is a video-conferencing app designed specifically to be used in a hybrid work environment–one in which both in-office employees and ones working remotely have to collaborate–and it’s built from the ground up with that ecosystem in mind.
There are a bunch of cool features built into Around, the most technical of which is the proprietary EchoTerminator technology. This software allows everyone in the meeting to keep their mics enabled throughout the session, whether they’re all in the same room or not–EchoTerminator will kill things like reverb, equalizes everyone’s sound so there isn’t any massive disparity, and auto-mutes obnoxious noises in the background.
Around does all of this without detracting from the audio fidelity needed to participate in meetings without annoying all of your coworkers, making the decision to mute or unmute a moot exercise.
While Around’s audio features are groundbreaking, they also focused on making the video experience less frustrating (and/or insecurity-activating). Around’s camera frame finds a face and focuses on it, whether or not the person attached to the face in question is moving. This helps keep the user in the frame at all times rather than allowing distracting background elements to make their way into the frame.
The camera even has an “anti-fatigue” filter that makes faces look softer and less sharp (or pixelated), thus preventing any high-definition anxiety.
In addition to the above features, Around includes multiple different persistent rooms so that you can jump into different meetings, audio-based rooms for whenever you need to take a break from the video stuff, and a cool option to transfer your call from your computer to your phone with one click if you need to take a meeting on the go.
As coworking becomes more common in the remote enterprise and high profile companies begin to implement hybrid work models, something like Around is exactly what the doctor ordered: a pleasant break from conventional video conferencing practices without requiring an entire upheaval of your building’s communications process.
