The conference floor and the demo bay
Floor 2 is one big meeting room with a reception in front of it, and the room has a screen you can use. Press E at the screen and a list of four presentations opens.
The floor changed shape in October. The video store and the comic shop used to be here, and the demo bay lived on the guest floor. On October 19 the video store and the comic shop moved to the mall, and the demo bay came down into a single large conference room. The room is the demo bay now, with a long table added behind it.
The reception and the room
The lift opens onto a reception with a stone floor. A walnut desk stands against the west wall, facing the lift doors, and a bench sits against the east wall. Plants stand in the corners. A sign on the cross wall, west of the doors, reads “Level 2, Conference floor”.
Ahead of you the cross wall has a pair of glazed double doors in it, six feet wide and centred on the lift. The room’s name is over them: “Conference room”. The leaves are open into the room, so you walk straight through.
The room takes the full width of the plate and is 46 feet deep. Windows run along both side walls, 28 feet of glass in 4 foot panes, set clear of the whiteboard at the front of the west wall. The front wall is the presentation wall, and the back, where you come in, is the cross wall with its doors.
A table 5 feet wide and 20 feet long runs down the middle, with eight chairs a side. It starts 8 feet behind the back row of demo seats. I set it there so the projector throws over the table and not into it.
The demo bay
Past the table, toward the front, is the demo bay. It is the only room in the building where every chair faces one way. Everywhere else in the building people face each other.
The seats are in two rows of eight, four on each side of a middle aisle. The walk clamp treats each block of seats as solid. An aisle you can ignore by walking through the chairs is not an aisle, so you go round them or down the middle.
The projection screen hangs at the centre of the front wall, 8.2 feet wide and 4.6 feet high. A faint slide is on it even when nobody has picked a deck, the way a projected picture shows in a lit room. A weighted bar hangs under it with a pull.
On each side of it is a dark panel carrying two smaller screens. The projector is a ceiling unit hung 11 feet out from the wall, behind the back row, with its lens off centre as most are. It has vents along one side and a status light on top. A soft halo round the lens makes it read as on from across the room, and a thin beam runs from the lens to the edges of the picture.
Under the screen is a bench 15 feet wide. Three machines sit on it, each with a green light. They are the machines doing the showing.
The whiteboard is on the west wall, 8 feet wide and 4 high, in an aluminium frame. A marker tray runs under it with a lip so nothing rolls off. Three markers lie in the tray, black, blue and red, and an eraser with a felt underside sits beside them.
The AV cart stands in the front east corner, turned a fifth of a radian off square toward the seats. It is the cart every school and every office had. It has three shelves with a lip round each, casters on swivel plates, and a power strip on the back post with its lead running to the wall. The top shelf carries a CRT television with a curved dark screen that glows faintly, and a row of buttons under it. A DVD player sits on the middle shelf with two cases lying on it, one blue and one red.
The CRT and the DVD player are props. They show nothing.
The screen you can use
The pull-down screen is the one working thing in the room. The decks are company marketing, so a visitor may use it.
Stand in the conference room within 34 feet of the screen, facing it within 55 degrees, and press E. You can also click the screen or tap it. From the far end of the table the screen is still the thing in front of you, so you don’t need to walk up to it.
A list titled “Presentations” opens, one button per deck with its slide count.
| Deck | Slides |
|---|---|
| FlameNet | 10 |
| Flamenet Messenger | 11 |
| Hitt Hosting | 10 |
| Hitt SE / Aerospace | 11 |
Pick one and slide 1 appears on the screen. Your view docks on the aisle, level with the middle of the screen and far enough back that the whole screen and a margin fit the window. A tall phone stands further back than a wide desktop. A line at the bottom gives the deck, the slide number and the slide title.
The keys are the ones a presentation uses. Right arrow, down arrow, Page Down, space and D go to the next slide. Left arrow, up arrow, Page Up, Backspace and A go back. Home and End jump to the first and last. N shows the speaker notes for the slide, and Escape leaves the screen. On a touch screen a short flick sideways turns the slide, left for next, the way a page turns. Next on the last slide stays on the last.
The slides load only when you use the screen. Nothing under the decks folder is fetched until the first E, click or tap, and then only the slide on screen and the one after it. A phone and the light quality setting get 1280 by 720 slides. Everything else gets 1920 by 1080. A slide with no image, or one that fails to load, draws as a title card with its title.
When I stand at the screen, everyone else in the room sees the slide I am on. A “Follow presenter” button appears for a visitor who has stopped following. The moment you pick a deck or turn a slide yourself, you are on your own slide and the room no longer pulls you along. Press the button and you are back with the presenter.
Next in the series is the lobby’s mail room and coffee counter, and the church on the level below.