Your work environment is made up of all of the elements that can affect your day-to-day productivity, including when, where, and how you work. You need a working environment that provides and promotes your business success and aligns with your organization’s core values. One of the quickest ways to engage attention and create impact is to build an immersive experience with video wall technology. The office environment of yesteryear is no longer, and has been overtaken by rapid technological advancement, allowing employees to interact with a global market, and even take work out to the road. Since its inception, video wall technology has made a substantial impact on how information is displayed within the operational environment.
The same display technology that creates these immersive environments also supports operations environments, transmission centers, and military missions. However, this data-rich display environment can develop into a sensory overload when it transitions to the workspace. Analysts have a different ergonomic environment: they are trying to react to information from displays that are located only a foot or two from their immediate line of vision and from large-array display walls in the command center.
The modern workplace has experienced a complete shift in how we spend our time. Time management has been optimized, and the efforts put into everyday tasks have been lightened. Employee productivity and efforts have been improved, allowing them to place more emphasis on more important things such as precision and creativity. The level of expectation of clients and co-workers has also changed as a result of technology in the workplace, such as video wall technology, keeping everyone connected on a constant basis. Results are expected much faster than ever before based on this evolution of technology in the workplace.
Video Wall Systems Allow for Flexibility
Think of your video wall like one big, blank canvas. Though the video wall consists of many individual tiles, a sophisticated control system allows you to display outside the bounds of the individual video wall panels. The content can stretch across multiple displays or even the entire video wall. In comparison to a projector or single screen, a video wall allows you to display more content in more space. A wide range of sources, from computers to cable feeds, can be incorporated and displayed together. Native content, streaming feeds, and video conferencing can exist side by side on a video wall display.
Superior Reliability and Versatility
Here is how video wall systems are reliable, resilient, versatile, and require minimal maintenance for operations environments:
Reliable & Resilient
Most video wall systems are built from professional-grade components, and some are specifically designed for 24/7, mission-critical environments. Consumer-grade projectors and displays use cheaper components and can’t provide the reliability or resilience of a video wall. Even high-end projectors require frequent maintenance and are vulnerable to vibration, humidity, and ambient light.
Minimal Maintenance
Since video walls are designed for maximum reliability and uptime, most have no consumable parts and require virtually no maintenance over years of operation. In contrast, projectors demand regular downtime to replace expensive lamps and light engines. While a video wall system may initially cost more than a projector, its low maintenance costs make it a more affordable solution in the long term.
Flexible Size & Shape
Video walls offer far more flexibility in terms of size and shape than a single display. Depending on the display type and mounting system used, they can be wall-mounted, free-standing, curved, non-rectangular, and even three-dimensional. They can be small enough to be portable or scaled to massive dimensions. This unique versatility enables video walls to be used in an enormous range of operations environments and use-cases.
Emergency Operations, Management, and Response
During emergency operations, management and response teams need high-resolution graphics displayed from multiple applications readily displayable to be simultaneously shared between many different users and operators. With time constraints, multiple agencies often need to get together and collaborate to make informed decisions and take the right course of action. Emergency operations can run continuously for extended hours or even days through various shifts and the uniformity and reliability of the displayed information, as well as the display wall, is critical.
Common Challenges
There are several common problems that people without design experience can run into when developing content for video displays.
Let’s explore a few:
Poor Ergonomics and Display Type
Operators usually spend eight to 12 hours a day working and looking at their monitors and making key decisions based on multiple data sets and graphics. It’s critical to focus on ergonomics and sightlines in this environment to ensure the operator’s success. If not designed properly, the workspace could lead to employee discomfort in the form of neck pain, muscle fatigue, eye strain, and perhaps most importantly, reduced production. Poor ergonomics and the wrong display type are exactly what a lot of the workforce is experiencing at home now during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Creating a Unified Display
The main goal when implementing video wall technology is to create a unified display, not several individual screens that appear pieced together. Those black bars in between the screens can get very distracting and interrupt the flow of your content. The capabilities of your video wall’s hardware and software will dictate how content appears on the screen. The content should be designed within the video wall dimensions to make the most of the technology’s capabilities. Remember, such factors as pixel pitch and screen resolution will also have a huge impact on the quality of the displayed content for operations environments.
Utilities
For control room display of SCADA and OMS information along with other critical data and graphics, all utilities control rooms require visually high-resolution display systems where image clarity and reliability are not only critical but imperative for smooth operations. It is impossible to display high-resolution SCADA on a small monitor without compromising quality and sacrificing readability. High-resolution graphics are displayed continuously for extended hours on the display wall and are monitored by operators who use them to ensure system reliability. The display wall is used not only to monitor operations but also as a visual reference for critical communications with field operators.
Successful video wall projects require a complex symphony of equipment, networking, and powerful functionality for an optimum visual experience. At VSGi, we work with some of the best equipment vendors in the world to ensure that every video wall project is specifically designed to best support your objectives and location requirements.