Australian Capital Territory Law Courts

The upgrade and development of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) heritage-listed Supreme Court included six new courtrooms, chambers, a library, jury facilities, and an overhaul of the e-court environment, including a dedicated remote witness zone with seven video conference suites.

The ACT Law Courts required a system that would serve the current operational requirements and be scalable to handle future demand. Introba (formerly Integral Group) worked closely with Programmed Electrical Technologies (PET) to implement a state-of-the-art environment. In consultation with key stakeholders and modeling technologies, testing was conducted in both virtual and physical realities, ensuring that the short-listed equipment was up to the task. The modeling and bench-testing exercises included speech intelligibility of court loudspeaker, user control interface and page structure, visual sightlines between participants and technology, and robustness of next-generation AV-over-IP signal distribution platforms to deliver maximum flexibility and adaptability for the future.

The design of the remote witness annotation system allows vulnerable witnesses to have all the technical functionality available still as if they were sitting in the courtroom, from the safety of the remote witness rooms, a first in Australia.

Project Highlight

• Explored and validated emerging technologies through stakeholder collaboration

• Bench testing and evaluation exercises in virtual and physical mock-up environments, promoting use of virtual reality (VR) environments in conjunction with Revit 3D/BIM

• Mitigated harsh acoustic nature of the heritage environments through electro-acoustic modeling and prototyping

• Priority Works package (completed and operational) upgraded12+ existing courtrooms at the ACT Law Courts Complex over 14-month period

• Infrastructure design flexibility to cater to more dynamic, future court proceedings

Photo Credit: © Peter Bennetts 2019