Magna Puts Vast Immersive Meeting Space On Auto Plant Floor

August 14, 2018 by Dave Haynes

This is a seriously whizzy-bangy meeting room space that’s interesting mainly because it is located in the heart of the production floor of a contract auto manufacturer.

I’ve been in an auto plant and with everything happening, everywhere, it’s a dirty, power-spiking, really challenging place to be dropping in a lot of high-tech visual systems.

The stuff I read on the project doesn’t quite spell it out, but I am pretty sure this is at a Magna Steyr plant in Graz, Austria and involves a room with three edge-blended laser projectors, a big touch table and a lot of software linked to systems on the manufacturing floor. Magna Steyr is a subsidiary of the Canadian contract manufacturer Magna, which has deep roots in Austria.

The projectors drive what can be a 7 metre wide by 2 high viewable surface. There are also two flat screens to the side. The immersive space is controlled off the 84-inch touch surface. The photo below suggest the set-up, designed by Ortlos Space Engineering, includes VR/AR/Gesture.

Glass walls allow for small meetings or they can be rolled back so that as many as 800 workers can gather and see things like an address from the CEO.

There are so many machines and processes happening on a floor that’s knocking out Jaguars or whatever that real-time dashboards that could be visualized on large screens would be immensely useful.

Display Daily has a more detailed, buzzword-bingo-filled post on the project here …

Interesting stuff. The HAVE A NICE DAY ticker on the top of the space makes me chuckle. All that money and THAT’S what gets communicated?