The last stop on our Autoventure was Cedar Breaks National Monument. We stayed in Cedar City, UT, and took the short 20-ish mile drive up to Cedar Breaks with a bit of road construction to slow us down. The park seems not to be very well known despite the spectacular scenery. It looks a lot like a mini Bryce Canyon, yet all above 10,000 feet! It is closed in winter, and nearby Brian Head has several ski areas which looked nice. The main visitor center was closed, but a temporary visitor center and store was set up just near the park entrance.
We stopped at the Sunset View Overlook for our first view of the amazing geologic formation below.
We then drove through an alpine meadow to stop at Chessmen Ridge Overlook for even more spectacular views.
We went on to the North View Overlook to see everything from yet another angle.
After a picnic lunch at the campground, we headed back to the Chessmen Ridge Overlook parking to take the Alpine Trail, a loop that took us to an algae-filled lake. We took the upper trail first and got to walk on snow for the first time in many years. The upper trail was fairly easy, but a number of trees had fallen and were blocking the trail, and the path down to the lake and lower trail was steep, muddy, and had lots of snow.
The lower trail was a fair bit more treacherous than the upper trail, with more fallen trees, more snow, and lots of mud. But, it was close to the edge of the canyon, so we got amazing views on the return journey.
We left Zion Canyon and Springdale and drove North on I-15 to Kolob Canyons. This is a lesser-known area of Zion National Park and was not at all crowded but is beautiful and offers nice hiking and picnicking. Our first stop after entering the park gave us great views of massive rock faces and deep valleys. Unfortunately, with all the sunscreen I was applying, I seem to have smeared the lens on my phone, so many of my pics from Kolob Canyons have artifacts, as can be seen in the right pic below.
From this viewpoint, we could see the road heading up and around.
We drove quite a distance along the road, past trailheads and small overlooks to get to the Kolob Canyon’s Viewpoint. Here we got spectacular views of enormous rock faces, as this panoramic view shows.
We then took the Timber Creek Overlook trail, a short, not too difficult trail that led to a high point with great views for many miles.
While it wasn’t nearly as hot at Kolob Canyons as it was in Zion Canyon, it was still pretty hot, so shade was important!
Ahh, relief!
Once we reached the end of the trail, we could see distant ranges, but also could look back at the rocks across the valley from the trailhead. It was a beautiful hike!
We visited Zion National Park over 2 days, with the first day in Zion Canyon. Because of overcrowding, shuttle buses take visitors up the canyon road to the various trailheads and sightseeing destinations. Even the buses were crowded when we visited, with lines to get on the bus, standing room only onboard, and lots of people at each stop. The photo below shows the line when we arrived, but I’m sure it only got worse for the next couple hours.
A problem we encountered was the closure of the bridge at Zion Lodge to get across to the Emerald Pools trailhead. I had the brilliant idea that we would start our hike at The Grotto, visit the Emerald Pools, then hike past the bridge that was out of commission, and get back to the road at the Court of the Patriarchs. This added a couple miles to the hike, but how bad could it be?
It was bad. It was over a hundred degrees F, I am pretty out of shape, and the trail markings are terrible (more on that later). Luckily we brought plenty of water, including my fancy new hydration backpack, which had a bite-and-suck mechanism to drink, which doesn’t work that well when one is struggling for breath. It doesn’t work that well for me, in my opinion, but I don’t exactly have a better idea. Plus the water tasted very plasticky, despite my attempts to clean the thing beforehand.
In any case, we set off with our hiking poles and water and made it to the lower, then the middle Emerald Pools, but were pretty beat at that point. So, we started heading down the trail to the broken Lodge bridge. At that point, the heat was getting to us, but there was no way we were going back up to the Emerald Pools to get back to The Grotto. We should have.
Instead, we followed the last sign we saw on the trail. It pointed us towards the Court of the Patriarchs a couple miles away via a horse trail. We saw people wading across the river and decided we didn’t want to do that, we’d find a perfectly fine bridge after a long walk. There was a lot less shade along this trail, particularly with the midday sun overhead, so it was quite punishing. Sure there were spectacular views, but who can appreciate them when you’re exhausted?
As we traveled south, the trail finally split, with one heading left towards the river and (hopefully) the Court of the Patriarchs. No, it just had even less shade and eventually met back up with the other trail, so we made our journey a bit longer and more miserable. With the lack of signage, we had no idea how much farther we had to go. And there was no cell reception, so maps wouldn’t load. (Yes, I had downloaded the map in the National Park app, and that would have helped, but in my exhaustion, I forgot). We could see the Court of the Patriarchs by that point, and once again, there were people wading across the river at a shallow point, so we decided to do the same. Had we known that walking another 1/3 mile might have taken us to a bridge, we would have done that, but again, no signs on the trails.
We caught the shuttle back to the visitor center, with the intention of going back to the hotel to rest, but by a happy accident, we got on the wrong shuttle and went back up the canyon. We stopped off at Zion Lodge for a well deserved rest and several bottles of the most spectacular tasting expensive water ever. And the view!
We spent a couple nights in Springdale near the entrance to Zion National Park. The town is nestled in a valley with spectacular views all around. These were from the window of the hotel room.
As we arrived at the hotel, a tour bus full of people arrived too. The next morning, the breakfast seating area was completely full of those tourists who seem to have set their alarm clock to the same time I did. Therefore, I had to sit outside on the deck. As you can see, I wasn’t suffering at all. 😄
There are loads of hotels along the highway in Springdale, and a very convenient bus runs the length of them and right to the entrance of the park. We and many others boarded the bus just near the hotel and, after 4 more stops, it dropped us at the park, which I’ll cover in another post.
We had a terrific dinner at the Bit and Spur, which has both indoor and outdoor seating. We chose to eat outside, because it had cooled into the 90s by that point in the evening and there was a pleasant breeze. The drinks were moderately priced, the service was great, and the food was delicious, including these yummy sweet potato tamales, one pork and one mushroom.
It was already hot when we left Las Vegas, and it was really hot when we arrived at Valley of Fire State Park. When we pulled up to Atlatl Rock for a quick picnic lunch, we saw a bit of commotion. Some bighorn sheep were searching for shade and perhaps some water, so lots of people were photographing them (including me, obviously).
Atlatl Rock has a bunch of petroglyphs high up the side of a rock face. Some scorching hot stairs climb up to these marks made by ancient people. I was intrigued with the lichen growing on the rock face as we walked to the stairs. Sadly, some graffiti “artists” have defaced some of the petroglyphs, but they are still spectacular.
After our lunch, we drove on to Arch Rock and parked to look for it. We walked around a rock formation and to a clearing and then looked back and there it was! Had we only crossed the road, we could have seen it. There also were fascinating holes eroded into the rock beneath the arch.
After that, we decided it was too hot to spend too much more time at Valley of Fire, so we’ll have to come back next time we’re in the area. We had to get to Zion National Park, and we knew we would lose an hour when we entered Utah because of time zone differences, so we headed out the east entrance and up to the I-15 for our trip towards St. George, UT and on to Springdale and Zion.
The reason for the trip was because I needed to go to the InfoComm trade show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Hiperwall didn’t have a booth, but our partner Sharp NEC was there, and I had a meeting set up on Thursday. While at the show, I visited booths of other partners, potential partners, and LinkedIn colleagues. I also walked around the show to see all the great display technology being offered. LED is everywhere, for both inside and outside. Much of the LED systems shown were fairly large pitch, so more for signage than control rooms, but several of the higher end vendors, especially Sharp, had finer pitch LED systems that would make great control room video walls!
InfoComm was spread across several of the Convention Center’s halls. I started in the Central Hall, but eventually made my way to the West Hall, where the display vendors were. Because of construction, there was no indoor route between the two, and the temperature was over 100 degrees F. Shuttle buses were provided, which I took, but that mostly involved waiting followed by a short drive. By the midafternoon, my phone said I had walked for 5 miles, mostly on the trade show floor – it’s a big show!
Based on advice from a colleague, we stayed at the MGM Signature hotel, which was great! The room was excellent, and the view spectacular, as you can see below. It was also convenient to the monorail, which I took to the convention center for the show. The MGM Grand has a great Italian restaurant, Luchini, where we had fantastic food and great service. I was able to have gluten free pasta and it was delicious. This may be the only trip I can recall where I had lots of exercise and activity, yet still probably gained weight – we ate very well!
In June 2024, my wife and I went on a driving trip, starting with the InfoComm tradeshow in Las Vegas, then continuing on to sightseeing in Nevada and Utah. This page will be kept updated with links as I create pages for each segment of the trip.
Note that you can click on any of the pictures to see a larger version.
Many video walls show critical information to help maintain the safety of a community or the productivity of a manufacturing plant or to monitor the behavior of complex networks and systems. The data and video feeds on these video walls are essential to the success of their organizations.
So how do we make sure your video wall content is available when it is needed?
Hiperwall’s HiperFailSafe approach to keeping your system operational even if a controller fails is part of the solution. Hiperwall’s distributed architecture means a failure of a display computer only affects a portion of your video wall, and the rest keeps running normally.
These are great solutions, but we needed to address data and source reliability problems as well.
In most systems, if the video capture device sending an important stream to the video wall fails or if a PC sending a data feed or a browser showing a dashboard fails, that content disappears. Throwing more hardware and software at the problem works by providing redundant feeds, but it doesn’t make operations with them seamless.
We developed HiperFailSafe Content to make sure your important data or video content can be shown even in the face of source failures. As long as there is an alternate source available, HiperFailSafe Content will show it if the primary source is missing. It is easy to have an alternate PC send the mission critical dashboard to the video wall, then the original plus the alternate can be combined into a HiperFailSafe Content item with priority to define their order. If the item being shown disappears, the first available alternate is shown in the same place(s) on the video wall. No operator intervention is required, and the integrity of the content is maintained.
As another example, if a news feed is part of the information needed in a public safety control room, and that feed is from an HDMI capture device, an alternate can be a screen capture computer sending the web version of that or a different news feed. HiperFailSafe Content objects are not limited to just two items – you can have alternates to your alternates, and even finally a static image warning that all the sources have disconnected to make the system operators aware. If the original content feed reconnects, it will replace whatever alternate is being shown, again without operator intervention.
How much does this very helpful capability cost?
HiperFailSafe Content has been available to all Hiperwall customers since version 7.1 and is available for no additional cost. We feel the feature is so valuable and important to our customers that everyone with modern Hiperwall systems should be able to use it to make their system even more powerful and reliable.
Contact Hiperwall, your video wall reseller, or visit the Sharp NEC Display Solutions exhibit at ISE2024 in Barcelona Jan 30 to Feb 2.
This was originally a LinkedIn post but I put it here for people that don’t want to log in there.
Hiperwall video wall software powered almost all the displays in the Sharp/NEC Displays booth at ISE 2023 in Barcelona. The massive, beautiful booth showed off several of Sharp/NEC’s big, bright LED display systems, many sizes, shapes, and orientations of LCD displays, and a few powerful projectors driven by Hiperwall video wall software version 8.0.
The Sharp/NEC Displays team, led by Massimo Gaetano, integrated Hiperwall into the booth for several purposes. Hiperwall’s ability to deliver lots of many types of sources to many displays, accounting for resolution, scaling, and rotation, meant that Sharp/NEC could easily share videos, streams, data feeds, and other content to any of their displays. They could even show the same content on many displays or span display walls with lots of content. They also took great advantage of Hiperwall’s ability to store and load groups of content on different parts of various video walls and displays. This flexibility let them show content in one area of the booth, then replace it with different content when another customer wanted to see something different while not affecting what was showing elsewhere in the booth. Sharp/NEC also used the HiperInterface web services-style network interface to programmatically load content and recall content groups using ZigBee (wireless) buttons, QR codes near many of the exhibits, and even phone apps. These advanced control mechanisms worked with Hiperwall’s content and source handling ability to make the displays in the booth responsive and dynamic!
See the video below to see the Sharp/NEC Displays booth driven by Hiperwall in action.
The Hiperwall software development team had a busy and productive 2022 with an outstanding video wall software release, and we’re preparing amazing stuff for 2023. Each member of the team designed, built, integrated, or tested complex software components that form the Hiperwall distributed video wall software product. Each team member expanded their capabilities by learning new techniques and skills to do a great job making highly capable and reliable software.
The big version release of 2022 was Hiperwall video wall software version 8.0. This version includes new features strongly desired by our customers, including HiperZones, the new HiperSource Streamer+, a new component to drive the video wall called HiperView+, and an enhancement to make HiperCast connections easier and more powerful with HiperCast Pull. Each of these major new capabilities and all the smaller features that go along with them add value to the product and give our customers more power to show their content in the most productive way possible. Customers with maintenance agreements can upgrade to version 8 where most of these features are included with no extra charge. Our Premium customers automatically get the incredibly powerful HiperZones when the upgrade, which is yet another reason the Premium package is the best deal around.
HiperZones
The crown jewel of the Hiperwall version 8 release is HiperZones, which allows a customer to define virtual video walls on their physical video walls to make separate zones of control and responsibility that help maintain content integrity. Different users can be assigned to control each zone and they cannot interfere with content on other zones. This means a large LED video wall can be split into different zones monitoring different regions of the country, for example, or different business elements. Changes to content in each zone are isolated from the other zones, so critical content is never obscured by another user’s content.
HiperZones is very useful for customers with large video walls, especially seamless LED walls, but it is also perfect for customers with multiple video walls or satellite displays, so content from one does not impinge on any of the others. The technology behind HiperZones is impressive – when customers learn that zone boundaries do not have to be display boundaries but can be defined to be nearly anywhere, they are impressed. Hiperwall software’s ability to manage and display content keeps getting better and better, and HiperZones is a huge step above traditional video wall capabilities.
HiperView+
Until recently, Hiperwall systems have typically used one small form factor computer per display to provide scalable performance as the system grew. In high-end systems with multiple LED controllers, we use HiperView Quantum to drive several LED controllers per computer and synchronize each computer to get frame-by-frame accuracy on content playback. We recognized the need to drive multiple displays or LED controllers for smaller systems from a single PC, so we developed HiperView+. This software is based on the powerful HiperView Quantum technology that optimizes video performance on NVIDIA GPU-based display computers but applies it to smaller systems that do not need multiple display computer synchronization. HiperView+ provides top-notch performance with multiple display output and is compatible with NVIDIA Mosaic technology to layout the displays.
Streamer+
The original HiperSource Streamer software is powerful and easy to use but is based on a Windows technology infrastructure that has not kept up with 4K video performance. The development team reimagined the Streamer concept and created Streamer+ based on new API standards that glean significant performance from the same hardware and take advantage of newer GPU hardware. It also uses a new more secure and more capable interface to the HiperController to allow for future enhancements. This new Streamer+ turned out to be a huge benefit for our customers and integrators during the pandemic supply chain constraints, because it allowed more and better streams from a single source PC, thus reducing cost and required hardware.
HiperCast Pull
HiperCast is a powerful capability to securely share source content between Hiperwall systems across town or across the world, but it was tricky for sysadmins to configure because of port forwarding and more. The software team developed a pull-based solution where each HiperController connects to the HiperCast server and subscribes only to needed sources. This new approach makes configuration of each Hiperwall system trivial yet adds significant power over content choice. HiperCast Pull increases the available audience for HiperCast’s sharing capabilities.
What’s next?
The Hiperwall software development team has not slowed down since the release of version 8.0. We have been working towards an exciting and powerful new release that builds upon HiperZones and the other great version 8 features. Beyond that, 2023 will see even more terrific new features and products added to the Hiperwall video wall software and beyond. We hope everyone who reads this has a terrific 2023 and we look forward to shaping the future with you.
