Real Estate Auction House Uses Pair Of Vast Fine-Pitch LED Walls To Monitor Business Activity

January 23, 2023 by Dave Haynes

Big LED video walls in company lobbies and reception areas are increasingly common, but the set up at the LA offices of CoStart Group is intriguing because of the way it was done, and also because the online auction firm uses more fine pitch LED for its core business activity.

CoStar describes itself as a leading provider of online marketplaces for the commercial and residential property markets. The company’s Irvine location has a fine pitch video wall at reception, and a  pair of 60-foot wide, three-sided video walls on the auction house floor. In all, the media players are driving 58 million pixels.

Reception has a digital art centerpiece, says PR from LED supplier SNA Displays, that “sets the tone for cutting-edge technological advancement as visitors enter the Irvine office space.”

The wall uses 10 vertical 1.2 mm LED columns, staggered to different heights and suspended between wooden columns, and runs purpose-designed creative. I like this because it’s not just a big rectangle, and also because it can lower overall costs by using fewer LED cabinets for the footprint of that wall.

The PR then gets into details about the control room-like set-up in the auction space …

CoStar’s Irvine location includes a pair of 60-foot-long, three-sided LED video walls on opposite wings of the auction floor. Both custom-built LED displays are 6’8″ tall and 59’6″ feet long, turning at 90-degree angles to provide an immersive experience for viewers. With a tight 1.2 mm pixel pitch, the twin display system have a 2,160 pixels high x 12,960 pixels wide resolution and process 23.5 million pixels each.

Directly between the two immersive LED screens is another video wall, an ultra-high-definition screen that employs an incredibly tight 0.9 mm pixel pitch. At 6’8″ x 11’10”, the 4K LED video wall at the center of the room processes 8.3 million pixels.

Staff use the three-sided immersive displays to monitor and analyze online auctions. The displays can show one large wraparound image or can be segmented into various content streams and visuals. This adaptability is a key resource for an agile, fast-paced work environment such as CoStar’s auction house.

Creating digital alcoves on either side of the center video wall required precise installation and give the room the look and feel of a command-and-control center with screens enveloping desks and providing a wide range of data-visualization options. With the center screen flanked on either side by the digital alcoves, the configuration promotes a highly collaborative work environment allowing multiple teams to work with many data streams at the same time.

The backend for the LED display systems at the CoStar Irvine office includes SNA Displays equipment, Analog Way processing, and ~sedna playback technology. Analog Way’s Aquilon C+ processor allows for a full-resolution native background layer and up to eight 4K layers on the enormous UHD LED video walls at once. Likewise, ~sedna’s content management system, called Creator, and the three Media Engine 8k servers offer a versatile platform that ensures high-quality, seamless, frame-accurate play-out results.

Very impressive, and nice to see companies using big LED for purposes other than Wow Factor or advertising. It’s also interesting to see the auction floor set-up. The darkened environment makes me think the room used to have LCDs or projection to show this information, and those technologies would benefit from the lights being dimmed or off. Doesn’t matter so much with LED.

 

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