So that was 2013 – a patchy, inconsistent year that saw progress in collaboration and digital signage, while other niches stalled. Nonetheless, 2013 saw the introduction of a number of new technologies which point the way to the future. Here are some of the highlights.
1. Curved or flat?
The hot topic at CES 2013 was the first showing of curved OLED screens from LG and Samsung, with both claiming a “world’s first”. Curved displays are said to work well with 3D content and even 2D material is said create a more life-like viewing experience. Landscapes and other wide angled scenes encircle the viewer when shown on a curved OLED screen. For professional applications LG showed how the curved displays can be combined to increase the impact on the viewer – they showed a wall of three screens. The wall was super thin, had a minimal bezel and was lighter than comparative screen technologies. As OLEDs generate their own light, there is no need for separate back-lights.
2. Collaboration joins the mainstream
Microsoft’s Room System for Lync was officially unveiled at Enterprise Connect, with an announcement of the software giant’s plans to work with four AV partners. Even before the official launch, the SMART Technologies version of the product had put in a cameo appearance on the Steljes at UC Expo in London. The SMART Room System includes one or more SMART Board interactive displays, an ultra wide-angle, high definition camera offering 109-degree field of view, customised speakers and microphones along with an extra-large room control console with a 29.5 cm display. The significance of the product is that it integrated a technology completely familiar to many corporate desktop users into the meeting room and other collaborative workspaces. With the corporates committing to Lync in ever-increasing numbers, the Lync Room System is the bridge to workgroup collaboration for more than five million users. While managing the content and communication process is all about Lync, the interaction with that content will be familiar to anyone with previous SMART Board experience. As usual, participants can switch between writing with a pen and erasing with the palm of their hand. Collaboration is intuitive and the system makes it easy to capture and email meeting notes to all participants as soon as the session has ended.
3. Collaboration: the hub of the issue
In March 2013 Barco acquired Taiwan-based AWIND, makers of the WePresent product line, thereby remedying a serious deficiency in the 2012 ClickShare product – the ability to work with smartphones and tablets. Nine months on from the AWIND acquisition, Barco added a new product to its ClickShare range. In addition to adding AWIND’s wireless technology to the original ClickShare, now called the ClickShare Conference (or CSC), Barco has taken the opportunity to introduce a lower-cost, small meeting room version called ClickShare Meeting (CSM). The new CSM Base Unit displays images up to Full HD resolution – via its HDMI or VGA output – and is fully compatible with both the ClickShare Button and the free apps for iOS and Android. Only one user can share content on-screen at a time, but eight Buttons can be connected wirelessly to the base unit, ready to share. Barco has already has competition at the CSC level, with Christie perhaps being the most notable, but at the CSM level there are any number of collaboration hubs or presentation gateways on the market. Expect to see many more products in this area next year, but Barco deserves the credit for focusing attention on the category.
4. Simple digital signage
Digital signage is an increasingly broad church. With a market that stretches from shopping malls to corner shops, we are seeing solutions introduced that extend the appeal of the technology at both ends of the market. In April we saw the UK launch of A+K Airgoo – an Android-based HDMI MicroPlayer for wireless digital signage. The minimalist USB design of A+K Airgoo makes the system very quick to set up and roll out. This versatility makes the MicroPlayer a simple and cost effective alternative to traditional digital signage. No additional hardware or installation is required; the entire device is powered via a micro USB port. Users simply plug the device into the HDMI socket of the display and play virtually any type of picture or video format. While the product is simple for the user, all the clever stuff is in the secure, cloud-based content management system that manages, organises and uploads content. Content is scheduled by playlists that can be assigned to individual displays or groups.
5. Transparent technology
2013 was the year that transparent displays really started to take off. The augmented reality concept has been around for a few years, but 2013 saw it fully realised with technologies that mixed real world objects with computer generated graphics. Most of the major players had examples of transparent LCD display cases, virtual fitting rooms and AR food and drink dispensing machines. Of the specialists, Engage launched a range of transparent display boxes using Planar and Realfiction technology. The display box is an enclosed showcase fronted by a clear glass surface that can display multimedia content in front of items placed inside the unit. Digital content is integrated with physical items, creating a whole new way to engage viewers, promote products and provide information. They can serve as standalone displays on counters or end units, the exterior sides of the boxes providing an opportunity to display complementary static signage or branding. This extension of the ‘silent sales assistant’ struck an immediate chord with retailers under pressure to reduce their transaction costs.
6. Saving the planet
When you consider the range of solutions introduced in the last couple of years, the AV industry can certainly hold its head up. Lamp-free projectors, LED displays and, in 2013, a new display technology from Sharp that promises 90% power savings. IGZO is a compound semiconductor (composed of Indium, Gallium Zinc Oxide) that can be used as a medium for a transparent thin-film transistor in large format displays. It replaces amorphous silicon for the active layer of an LCD screen, and, with a forty times higher electron mobility than amorphous silicon, it supports smaller pixels, higher screen reaction speed and lower energy consumption. In 2013 Sharp demonstrated two IGZO of its own, and has other manufacturers interested. For the present, Sharp has shown its 32-inch PN-K321H Quad-Full HD display and has adopted the technology in a number of tablet and smartphone products sold in Japan. From a large format display perspective, the great thing about IGZO is that it offers higher resolutions, thinner displays and lower energy consumption. The screens are more energy efficient because they don’t need to be refreshed constantly to prevent the image from flickering.
7. System on Chip
When you are manufacturing vast quantities of displays, monitors and TVs, adding a new piece of silicon costs very little (at least, in relation to retrofitting new features as an aftermarket sale). Samsung seized the opportunity that its scale of manufacturing offers, plus the company’s access to mobile phone chipsets, to create a System on Chip digital signage solution. At the point of manufacture, the vendor doesn’t know where a display it will end up, or what it will be used for – so why not build the technology that supports target applications in, unlocking them when the customer’s need is known? For those who want a plug and play digital signage solution, Samsung has built Smart Signage Platform technology into more than 30 models into its display range, ready to be activated. In order to do this, the company has scaled down the hardware to a very small chip set so as not to affect the overall appearance or dimensions of the display. This System-on-Chip technology was the logical next step in a process that has seen a progression from standard PCs driving digital signage, to small form industrial PCs and, most recently, solid state media players. The Samsung Smart Signage Platform features a 1 GHz dual-core CPU, 512KB cache and a 1GB, DDR3 dual 32-bit memory, high-performance video processing codec and a choice of 4GB or 8GB of storage. In effect, this is an embedded media player allows users to play back content without the need for a separate PC or set-back box.
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Samsung’s System-on-Chip technology is installed in 30 models in the company’s display range.
8. BYOD
While Bring Your Own Device probably had its origins before 2013, the challenges posed by integration of mobile devices and installed AV solutions certainly came to the fore in the last 12 months. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the education market. While it is currently uncommon to see educational establishments implement a BOYD policy – something normally associated with the corporate world – 67% of the schools who responded to a BESA survey in 2013 stated that BYOD schemes were either important or very important to the adoption of tablets in schools. In addition to this, 81% of schools showed a willingness to consider tablet adoption with parents covering the cost of the technology. BYOD can work hand-in-glove with the ‘flipped classroom’ concept, allowing users to: create multimedia files; collaborate asynchronously; and show content from a tablet on the main classroom display. In the event that the apparent interest in BYOD is translated into purchasing intentions, vendors are hedging against the possibility. From early stirrings in 2013 expect to seem solutions that streamline the management and integration of a multiplicity of multiple devices in both the education and corporate environments, and a renewed emphasis on security.
9. Sharing mobile content
With more business travellers using their smartphones to hold their presentations and other resources to share with colleagues there remains the challenge of getting the content onto a larger display for group meetings. While it was launched a year earlier, the adoption of DisplayNote when the company partnered with BenQ, NEC and Sahara accelerate in both the education and corporate sectors in 2013. Using DisplayNote, any connected device can share their screen, annotations and drawings with a presenter or with any other connected device. Tablets, as well as PCs, laptops and smartphones, projectors, whiteboards and touch screens can be networked via a router to the teacher’s PC. The same software runs using a uniform user interface for all these devices.
9. 4K and beyond
4K displays before 2013, but the year saw the CE manufacturers preview the models priced for the general consumer market. As the installed base grows, demand for 4K content increase commensurately. The problem is: how do you move it around. Solutions started to appear in 2013. Media Links claimed to have solved the problem with its MD8000 codec. This can act as a bi-directional interface between all the current formats of SDI and the IP world. At the close of 2013, developments in 4K displays are far outpacing those in content availability and the infrastructure for delivering 4K content to the end-user. This is clearly a situation that has to be resolved before the technology is ready for wide scale adoption. The situation is being addressed rapidly, where 4K is widely regarded as a better long-term solution for installations of public displays than 3D.
