August 25, 2011

By Jennifer B. Davis

I have been reading a great book by Tim Brown, a founder and thought leader at the famed industrial design firm, IDEO, called “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.” In the book he emphasizes that traditional fields of design (i.e., art, architecture, etc…) approach problems differently than other disciplines and having a more design-centric view can lead to more revolutionary outcomes. Hospital emergency room redesign, an example he uses in the book, is not just about the efficiency of filling out forms or the staff-to-patient ratio, but about the materials in the waiting room and how the process makes the patient feel. Design thinking is about approaching a problem holistically and understanding (or seeking to understand) the larger context of the problem at hand.

This is the kind of thinking that influenced our design of the Clarity Matrix LCD video wall system. The face that it is a system, rather than monitors that you can buy and hang adjacent to each other, is in itself telling. We didn’t limit our design to just the display. We developed an innovative mounting system and revolutionized the industry by allowing tiled LCD video walls to meet the stringent ADA requirements. We innovated the electronics design, placing fans, power supplies, and sources away from the wall. This alone creates huge benefits with regards to product life (less heat), installation costs (no power outlets behind the wall), and human factors (less noise), but also has significant serviceability benefits that we knew well from our long and pioneering history in video walls for demanding applications. The innovation continued with power supply redundancy, front-serviceability of the display tiles themselves, and image processing that is included, allowing you to stretch one video or image over an entire wall or portions of the wall as your needs dictate. Options like our ERO™ technology and Clarity Matrix with Touch are changing the usage model for video walls again.

Our approach is so unique that has created a whole new category of video walls: tiled LCD video wall systems. We are the world’s leader in this new category. The Clarity Matrix is a great example of design thinking and just one of the many product lines at Planar that reflect this kind of innovative approach.

June 21, 2011

By James Wood

The rectangle dominates signage. Billboards, menus, movie posters and nearly every sign is locked into the rectangle. Digital signage has been following the same path, largely due to the form factor of display panels (surprise, surprise, also rectangles). But the growing trend seen in digital signage is different shapes. It might be an arch, a wave, a tower or a spiral, but the shapes are coming out to play.

It’s not the individual panels that are changing in size, but the configuration of the panels that provides different shapes. Two things are necessary to allow the variety of configurations to work at all: a versatile mounting system and a powerful video processor.

Lo and behold, the Clarity Matrix Video Wall has both. Not only does the EasyAxis mounting system allow the individual screens in the video wall to be individually adjusted on six different axes, but it also lets you configure the matrix with differently oriented panels and curved arrays. So the banner display can wrap around a building or follow the curve of interesting architectural pieces.

Planar’s own Indisys image processing system can break up an image across any configuration of panels imaginable. So the text can spiral along the path of the curving panels or the image can appear to be seen through the shape of the video wall. And each of the panels, like the Clarity Matrix MX 55, a 55 inch high-def display, communicates to the video processor where it is in the array, automatically.

The rectangle is no longer the only shape possible for signage. But some things have to be seen to be believed.