Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 29, 1994 TAG: 9410310035
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Snaking through the floors, walls and ceilings of the hotel and adjacent center will be miles of cables, wires and fiber-optic lines that will make the $42 million project a computer geek's dream come true when it opens next year.
The electronic spaghetti will connect business people, academics, guests and conferees to London, Singapore, Silicon Valley - anywhere one can travel in cyberspace.
"At least in technology, we'll be significantly ahead of the top 10 conference centers in the country," said Brian Wishneff, executive director of the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center Commission.
One day, for instance, veterinarians will be able to sit in a conference center lecture hall and watch live surgery at Virginia Tech's equestrian research center in Leesburg, said Dixon Hanna, executive director of finance and administration for Tech's Division of Outreach and International Programs.
Engineers will be able to sit in the hall and watch computer simulations from the university's mainframe. And doctors and nurses will be able to complete continuing-education courses beamed into the conference center over telephone lines and displayed on huge, rear-projection video screens.
Although planners always intended the project to go high-tech, details weren't spelled out when it was launched. Since then, Wishneff, commission members and Tech faculty have visited dozens of conference centers across the country as part of a brainstorming process on innovations that can be used to lure academic and business groups they want to bring to the facility.
"Part of it's technology. Part of it's marketing. What we're looking at is how we can prepare a conference center that will remain current for at least the next six to eight years. We will be offering technology that no other conference center I'm aware of has," Hanna said.
The technological improvements can be grouped roughly into six categories:
Most hotel rooms have a single incoming telephone line; Hotel Roanoke will have two lines per room. It will allow business people or conferees to hook up a lap-top computer or fax machine to one line and use the other to talk.
The hotel and conference center commission last week agreed to install higher-grade wiring than was called for in the original plans. The $110,000 upgrade will "future-proof" the building, Wishneff said.
"There's nothing on the horizon that anybody's talking about that couldn't be done with this cable," he said.
Electricians also will install $20,000 worth of wiring for an in-house video system - kind of a private cable network - throughout the conference center and the hotel.
Guests will be able to watch lectures in the conference center on televisions in their rooms. Also, overflow crowds in one conference center room will be able to watch presentations in other parts of the center, Wishneff said.
The center will be wired with a $15,000 network that allows computers to talk to each other. The network, called an Ethernet, is vastly faster than a normal modem and telephone hookup. In terms of speedy data transmission, an Ethernet is like a six-lane highway compared with a dirt road.
Plans call for a $1,000-a-month, high-speed data transmission line to Blacksburg, linking Virginia Tech's campus - and possibly the state-of-the-art Blacksburg Electronic Village - to the conference center.
The line will extend the campus electronically into the conference center and give conferees access to the Internet.
The center will have two computer workstations that conferees, hotel guests or local business people may use to access the Internet. Because they will be hooked into the high-speed Ethernet, real-time video and audio data transmission will be possible. The average office's normal computer-phone hookup is too slow for that.
The workstations will be available for a fee, and Wishneff expects them to be revenue-producers.
Another $100,000 will be spent to install two 9-by-12-foot rear-projection screens in the lecture hall. The screens can be run by conventional video equipment or by computers.
The improvements likely will be used by the Center for Organizational and Technological Advancement, a Virginia Tech-sponsored think tank based in the conference center, Hanna said.
Keywords:
CONVENTION CENTER
by CNB