How to give a good lab tour? I am often called upon to give a "lab tour" to visitors, including but not limited to:


prospective graduate students
candidates for summer research positions (including undergraduate and high school students)
researchers or executives from our "industrial partners"
professors and graduate students from other universities, who have come to speak in my department seminar series
journalists or other media representatives


The goal of these lab tours is to leave the visitor(s) with the impression that we are doing interesting, important, and exciting research.

The research that goes on in my lab mainly looks like... students sitting at laptop computers. We are a telecommunications lab. A lot of the experimental equipment we use is not actually housed in the lab, and the pieces that are there in the lab are not that unique or interesting to most visitors. (Think a few Openflow switches and lots of wireless devices, none of which is particularly visually exciting.)

Given this, I am wondering how to use these "lab tours" to my best advantage. What can I do in a lab tour that I couldn't do with, say, a visitor sitting down in my office and talking to me over my desk?

Right now we mainly walk around the room and talk about the posters hanging on the wall, giving any students who are around a chance to give their elevator pitch. This doesn't seem very effective, and visitors often seem kind of bored.
Depending on your data and work, it maybe beneficial to make some sort of visual representation and/or simulations of your work. People are draw to visual representations that move and do something. Stationary images, while informative, are not always interesting to the layperson (or well even those interested in the field). You could create a presentation that shows the hardware that collects your data, the raw data and then create a road map back to your students at your lab. Show screen grabs of any software that your students might utilize from day to day. You don't need to get too elaborate and there are many resources (power point, desktop applications, web applications, etc) that you could utilize to create your presentation with whatever level of effort you wish to put into it. 

I would also suggest looking for someone to consult with, not affiliated with your lab, to view your presentation.This way you can get a fresh outlook on how your presentation flows. If your school has a scientific and technical (STC) writing program, I would also suggest you talk with someone in the program about your presentation. They might be willing to help out with making things more interesting and clearer for prospective visitors. You could possibly even see if a student in the program would be willing to create a presentation for you as a senior project.