May 31, 2011

By James Wood

The thing that most people don’t understand is that when you’re designing a building you can’t just do whatever you want. There are whole libraries filled with codes that need to be met in every building. Rules are good, they protect people and property. But all those standards can take some of the artistry out of designing and make it feel more like paint-by-number. Designers are just tasked with plugging in solutions that will comply with all the regulations; one is blue, three is green. But most designers want the chance to express themselves and stun their audiences.

One standard that has limited creativity comes from the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) stating that objects can’t protrude more than four inches from a wall. This is good since it provides for easy movement and access to areas for all people, but it’s had unintended consequences. Installing an impressive video wall has been limited by the mounting systems and size of the screens, which exceed the ADA four inch maximum. So video walls can’t start at the floor or be within 80 inches of the ground if they stick out too far from the wall.

Planar engineers have solved the problem. The Clarity Matrix line of LCD displays mount to the wall and protrude only 3.6 inches. So instead of a video wall hanging high overhead, the screens can be up close and personal. There are no walls that are off limits for video design. Curved walls, walls without power supplies and the entire height from floor to ceiling, it’s all available like a blank canvas ready to be painted. The only rules are your imagination. The mounting is so thin, in part, because the only thing on the wall is the display. The power supplies and digital signal processing are all in a separate location. So the heat, weight and fan noise of power supplies are moved away from the video wall to a discrete location. All the controlling can be done from the comfort of another room. So all the space that is saved by moving those functions to an external location make the Clarity Matrix display seem to be a part of the wall itself.

Rules and regulations are meant to keep people safe, not to limit the imagination. Let your creativity run wild.

May 20, 2011

At the Digital Canvases Event, hosted by Planar Systems on April 14th at the Savant Experience Center in New York City, leading architects and designers loaned their considerable talent to put video displays through their paces and to show how the Clarity Matrix and other products from Planar are becoming important architectural tools.

The thin-profile mounting system (less than 3.6") of the Clarity Matrix delivers the world's only ADA-compliant LCD video wall and the image-to-image gap (which is as small as 5.7mm) delivers stunning imagery creating a digital canvas for the design community to discover and use.

"We responded with enthusiasm to the conceptual challenge of working within this digital video medium of the Planar Clarity Matrix," said Gisue Hariri, a partner at Hariri & Hariri-Architecture, a leading firm in New York. "We have found it an ideal tool for illuminating ideas as they map to global design concepts."

Hariri was one of the many designers who showcased their work during the Digital Canvases Event. Hariri & Hariri-Architecture featured designs that weave together nature and technology as they manifest in the firm's newest mixed-use project in Salzburg, Austria. Other architects and designers present at the event included:

• The Bjarke Ingels Group, an innovative architectural firm headquartered in Denmark, who featured a flyover video of his project with Durst Fetner Residential on West 57th Street in New York.
• Joel Sanders Architect who featured his custom executive hotel concept with a video recently hailed as visionary by the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum at The Smithsonian.
• Studio Dror who exhibited custom video of how its new global building truss 'QuaDror' was conceived and is being implemented in projects on several continents.
• VanDam Information Architects who debuted for the very first time its 'MApp' for New York City, a 4D experiential new iApp.

Click Here to view photos from the event.

By Jennifer Davis

I had the privilege of participating in StudioDror’s launch of their new design geometry, QuaDror. It was held at the New Museum in Manhattan and an overview video was featured on the Planar ep55 flat panel, which was part of the display. At a press conference hosted by Linda Tischler from Fast Company and Kimberly Brooks from Huffington Post, Dror Benshetrit spoke about his inspiration.

He said that at the launch in South Africa the week before, he met a teacher who encouraged students to first love, then do, then create, and then share.

It seems to me that this is the formula for innovation. You have to first start with empathy and love for the people who you are working with or for. Often it starts as a problem that needs to be solved. But in order to understand the problem, you have to understand WHY it is a problem and really care enough about the problem to want to solve it.

Only then can work be done. The work of doing, experimenting, discussing, debating, creating, and designing can be highly individual or collaborative, but once it is done the innovation must be shared. It is the final step in the formula. Only then can it solve problems and inspire others.

The Clarity™ Matrix is an example of this type of innovation. After pioneering rear-projection video walls, we understood the challenges of designing for the depth of creating a large and impressive digital display. Sometimes that depth can be easily accommodated, in a control room setting for instance, but in digital signage and architectural implementations, designers and AV installers needed something that was closer to the light box that they were familiar with.

It is this empathy for the customer that led us to build the world’s thinnest LCD video wall system, with a total depth, including the mount, measuring less than 3.6”. It is the only video wall that meets the stringent Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements.

Our optional Extended Ruggedness and Optics™ (ERO™) option derives from our understanding of the toll that displays take when installed in public environments, especially touch-enabled interactive displays that are growing in popularity.

Of course the product also has the modular flexibility to make it a perfect fit for a variety of design applications from corporate lobbies to hospitality, from higher education student centers to retail merchandising applications that are changing the experience for consumers and the brands they love.

And we continue this process of innovation with hopes of delivering useful tools that will be a part of your designs and solutions.