The Hiperwall booth at InfoComm in Las Vegas went very well. We brought a 12 monitor wall, consisting of 46” NEC thin-bezel monitors on a Premier mounting system and driven by Technovare Core i5 set-top PCs. We also borrowed two 55” monitors with embedded AMD PCs to show that our software is very flexible and can drive standalone monitors or even multiple display walls. We mounted the two monitors back to back on a single Premier mount with one monitor facing the aisle and the other into the booth. Our final configuration was the 12-panel wall, the 2×55” monitors configured as a separate wall, and a large-screen HP laptop configured as a third display wall. All these were controlled by a Gateway touchscreen PC and connected via compact 24-port gigabit Ethernet switch. Our sources were several minitower i5 and i7 PCs. One had a Datapath capture card connected to a 1080p Sony camera, while another had a webcam feed from a fancy D-Link pan-tilt webcam (we can control the pointing of the camera from the Hiperwall Control Node via our Sender’s built-in KVM capability), and another PC was running a very large, dense, and dynamic Excel spreadsheet that looked great on the display wall and showed that live content from proprietary applications is extremely easy to show on a Hiperwall.
A primary focus of our presentation was to show our new animation capabilities, so we ran a pre-release version of Hiperwall 3.0, and had several animation sequences configured into what we call “environments.” Our most spectacular one is a high-res photo of the Earth (NASA’s Blue Marble 2012) rotating (yes, we know the earth doesn’t rotate that way, but it looked good) with the Moon orbiting around it. The movie below is similar to the environment we used at the show, but we had our logo and other content on there as well. The major difference between our software and traditional video walls is that the animation is not a movie. Instead, we can animate any of our display content, including live feeds, on the fly, either through pre-built animations defined using our simple keyframe interface or via our XML-based web services interface. This means changes to animation steps or content being animated are trivial, which gives us a huge leg up on the traditional approaches.
Another animation we showed was a set of travel poster images designed by Saddle Ranch Digital for the Hiperwall system they installed for JetBlue. These spectacular posters were given life by our ability to move, scale, rotate, and filter them in real-time in animated sequences.
When these animations were running, passers-by stopped and stared, and many of them were intrigued enough to stay and talk to us and learn about our system. We had visitors from all over the world stop by. Some were customers, while many were dealers, integrators, and consultants. We even had a few of our competitors visit to see our product.
I believe the show went well. The booth looked good and all hardware worked! The Hiperwall software performed well, too, despite being a beta version (we did catch a bug with the Secondary Controller, so I’ve already fixed that). Many of the visitors that saw our capabilities told us they were very impressed, which is gratifying to hear that our hard work is well-received. Next year’s InfoComm is in Orlando, so I’ll hope to see you there!
