InfoComm Impressions: Day 1

June 13, 2013 by Dave Haynes

It’s a little hot here, as in Oh My God How Do People Live Here? hot. But that’s typical in the years the pro-AV trade show comes here.

Crowds look pretty good to my untrained eyes, though there are always guys at the backs of halls idly chatting and reading emails. I ended up in planned and spontaneous meetings for much of Day 1 so I did not see much as planned, and I did make a point of seeing what some of the kind folks who sponsor this blog are doing.

Jim Vair was deep into the massive Samsung booth show its progress developing to the display company’s Smart SignagePlatform (disclosure: I also do some work with Samsung), and were showing a meeting room application that was integrated with meeting room calendar systems, NFC and tablets. As they have done with an Android player, the Toronto-area company knows how to get a LOT out of a device,  in this case the A9 ARM processor inside Samsung’s System on Chip displays.

Samsung, by the way, had a huge, visually intriguing winged video wall thingie at its booth gateway. I liked.

I also made a point of meeting the guys at CE labs, which makes solid state media players and ships them with supporting software. I was impressed with the teeny deck of cards size of the units, low price point and bundled management software. The one I really liked had extra inputs and a controller function and ports that would allow  content to be triggered with thins like external switches and buttons, so something as simple as a door opening could force a specific file to play. This is not all that new, but I like that was built into a device and did not necessitate finding a separate gadget to that make that part happen (been there).

I also poked around Aopen’s booth, and got more of a rundown on its OpenSign platform – all-in-one smaller displays with touch that are aimed at retailer and driven by web services and HTML5. Kevin Cosbey of Aopen is on of those so far few guys in the space who sees how web developers can apply work done for online to digital displays without needing a CMS.

There is no end of beautiful displays, and some nice looking touch user experiences, particularly the Multitouch stuff from Finland.

There is also plenty of stuff that gets me cross-eyed. One of the big displays had a giant 3D video wall, which can only beg the simple question: Why? Who would use it???

That said, LG like most of the display guys have sleek, gorgeous displays everywhere.

I like the projection map inverted pyramid hanging over the Panasonic booth, and the other end of the scale a demo Christie was doing that showed how projection and mapping could be used to preview a sports car in different colors.

And those little robot, remote live camera/telepresence things you see roving around the back of some trade shows. Now there are at least three companies selling these things. Wonder if someone can make them battle each other.