In early December, Miami Beach played host to thousands of artists, collectors, dealers and lovers of art who descended upon the city to attend Art Basel, the most prestigious art show in the Americas, as well as over 15 other shows happening in and around the area. For the first time, Planar joined in on the week’s festivities, showcasing Planar products at three different venues. Planar’s team, led by VP of Marketing Jennifer Davis, hit the ground running with a jam-packed schedule of meetings and events.

Planar’s art show debut launched at Avant Gallery, in partnership with Avant Gallery and Surface Magazine, at the 3rd Annual Pictures + Furniture event on November 30th. The event marked the official launch of the new Planar Silhouette displays, featuring work from top industrial design and furniture artists Chad Jensen, Philip Michael Wolfson and Pryor Callaway on two Silhouettes placed in the gallery among the art work. Planar’s displays created a buzz with attendees, many who commented they were surprised at how displays could be transformed into works of art.

At the PULSE Contemporary Art Fair, multimedia artist Yorgo Alexopoulos’ work “No Feeling is Final” furthered Planar’s message that technology and art can work in harmony. Yorgo used an 8x14 Planar Clarity™ Matrix LX-46 media wall to display his video art at the Cristin Tierney Gallery exhibit.

Finally at the Miami SOLO show, Planar demonstrated thought leadership by showing two prototypes of the digital canvas with technology partner Samsung Semiconductor. The displays have been designed to go beyond traditional commercial and television products, and are customized for the display of fine art with optical enhancements, electronics, and architectural frames worthy of an institutional or individual art collector.

The week also provided Planar with a wonderful opportunity to engage in conversations with everyone from artists to collectors regarding the endless possibilities displays can offer in the art and design realm. On Saturday, the Planar team boarded their plane back to Portland exhausted, but exhilarated with the week’s success.

December 8, 2011

This holiday season, the Planar Silhouette™ is on everyone’s wish list! We got into the spirit and put a bow on the Silhouette in our lobby. You can see how impressively the Silhouette displays show a variety of still image content, in this case being driven from a small media player tucked into the base of the Silhouette. The product towers over 10 feet and is designed to elicit an emotional response, while making video and images more attention-grabbing and artistic. To find out more about the product, click here or let us connect you with a Planar Digital Signage expert.

September 22, 2011

Planar, maker of many kinds of cool display technologies, approached ADi with a unique proposition. Conceive and design an animation for a video display. The display is pretty much one of a kind – ten feet tall, made of 4 display panels with almost no bezel. They are mounted on a tree-like frame that sprouts up out of a base that cleverly disguises the media player and inner workings of the “Art Wall”. We are going to follow the progress of this project and show you step by step how it comes together.

Today, we speak with Seth Cameron Short, ADi Creative Lead about his approach to designing for this unique platform as well as Jennifer Davis, VP of Marketing at Planar:

What intrigued you about this project?

Seth: This project was both exciting and unnerving at the same time. Typically, when clients approach ADi that want us to do something with their brands and their products – fundamentally, it’s about selling something. This project was different because it was about inspiring the imagination (of architects and interior designers). Our limits were not creative ones. We were limited by the shape of the art wall, that’s about it.

Why was it important to Planar to bring in an outside creative partner for this project?

Jennifer:Planar is a company full of creative and innovative people, but we are not a creative agency. We knew that by collaborating with a firm of artists who understood the tools of video design and communication would lead to a great collaboration. We have seen this play out many times in our projects and installations, as creative forces join together to create something unique and relevant.

How did you come up with ideas and concepts?

Seth: Our first thought was to create something we’d want to see. Something fresh and new. We did a lot of group brainstorming. Our team is very used to this process and we have a certain level of trust that makes it work well. It’s great to get many different perspectives. It’s ok to be crazy or “out there” in the brainstorm. No one is going to say no. It’s the off-the-wall stuff that eventually gets us to a solution.

What was your process for pulling all the ideas together?

Seth: First I gathered my notes and everyone’s note and reviewed them. We had also pulled some reference images and a few folks had done doodles and sketches. I kept going back to my first inclination which was asking myself – “Would I like to see that?” I also had to look at what was possible in terms of time and content. We had a few ideas that had a sort of narrative to them and they were great, but it wasn’t realistic to think that someone walking through a hotel lobby is going to stop and watch a 12 minute story unfold.

How important were the visuals in terms of showing the ideas?

My first step in organizing the concepts was to write up written descriptions, and then start to think about how to show them visually. In the final presentation, most of the words were all stripped away and we let the visuals do the talking. We shared written descriptions with the Planar team, but mostly for their reference – it was very conversational.

How did the Planar team react to the concepts?

Seth: Well, we brought 6 concepts total. We presented them in a sequence and I confess at first I was nervous because they weren’t reacting much. Suddenly, once we were through about the third one and they were able to compare ideas side by side, they really started to spark. They then started adding ideas of their own or combining ideas. Seeing the client dive in and get involved is my main goal.

Jennifer: We loved the range of concepts and the clear thought and preparation that had gone into each. Although the graphics associated with each were rough and meant to be illustrative of the concept, we could see clearly how sophisticated and clever the resulting designs could be. In our design review, we were able to narrow down to a concept (or combine a few into a single concept) to take to the next phase.

What concept were you most excited about?

Seth: I’m really partial to simulating physical things – particles, liquids. We had one concept that used a liquid simulations and took advantage of the physical “frame” of the art wall to make things happen dynamically. Kind of a really fancy lava lamp.

Jennifer: My personal favorite was the “behind the scenes” mechanism concept. I liked it because it was unexpected and brought the shape of the displays into a depth dimension by creating a world behind the displays. It also allowed us to combine some of the things that we liked about the others (ie, fluid dynamics, etc) into one unifying concept.

How did you react when Planar picked their favorite concept?

Seth: Well, none of the ideas we presented were ideas I didn’t like. I was really happy to see them react to the “Mechanism” concept. They even found the little robot character sort of hidden in the scene. It’s great when you realize the client has really started to take it into their minds. That’s when I know it’s really clicking. It was fun to see them connect with it.

What are the next steps in the process?

Seth: The next thing we’ll be doing are storyboards. Those will include more written descriptions of the action and flow of the animation, as well as more visuals. I’ll be working very closely with our Art Director Vince Nimmoor on those.

Do you see ways to carry this concept forward into the future for different configurations?

Jennifer: Absolutely. The wonderful thing about video displays is that they can show anything. The wonderful thing about art is that the ideas never cease. I imagine that this first implementation will just inspire new rounds of creativity. We also know that our customers, which range from architects to AV installers in industries as diverse as utility control rooms to retail merchandising, will find inspiration as well.

For the final audience for this project, architects and interior designers, what do you want them to think or feel when they see the final art wall?

Seth: It’s more than a customizable painting. I want to “break the 4th wall”, so to speak. I want them to see how this could work, even if they don’t use that particular style or feel for their own project. This whole project is a sort of deconstruction – a whimsical deconstruction.

(From AnimationDynamics.com, By Nancy Hoffman, September 22, 2011 - Click here to read the original post).

September 7, 2011

From Planar Systems comes another entry for the “Famous Firsts” list at TheLongestListOfTheLongestStuffAtTheLongestDomainNameAtLongLast.com: the first integrated multi-panel touch screen display. While that may not roll right off the tongue, it’s a tremendous breakthrough. Prior to the launch of the Clarity Matrix Touch on June 15th at InfoComm 2011 in Orlando, Florida, multi-panel touch screens had to be cobbled together from different vendors with various components. It was a situation that would challenge the inestimable Dr. Frankenstein’s skills of stitching parts together.

You can now order a 2-by-2, 2-by-3 or 3-by-3 video wall made up of Clarity Matrix displays. That means that you can have anywhere from a 92 inch diagonal display to a 138 inch screen. On this gigantic display you can touch, tap, drag, pinch and swipe. The multi-touch capabilities can be used to manipulate all sorts of interactive applications from digital whiteboards to maps to playing a giant game of Spider Solitaire. The Clarity Matrix Touch comes with full support for the Windows 7 Touch Pack, so you can just hook up a computer and start working.

For the worrisome-mom types out there (you know who you are) who are already thinking of how many ways this can be damaged by all of the wanton poking and touching it will receive, you can rest easy. The Extended Ruggedness Optics (ERO) glass that covers the screens protects them from finger pointing and even more. The ERO glass provides another first: the Clarity Matrix is one continuous touch surface that is made up of separate pieces of glass. In the past touch screens couldn’t go past the edges of a pane of glass, either requiring a huge pane of glass or a smaller touch screen. Planar has solved that problem with an optical bonding process so the Digital Vision Touch technology provided by SMART Technologies sees nothing but the open expanse of one touch screen for your fingers to roam.

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.

Scientists have been busy unlocking the secrets of the human brain: how it works, how it fails and what all that means. The field of neuroscience is making new discoveries daily, but who’s to explain the science to the rest of us? John Medina (Dr. Medina, that is) is a neuroscientist at the University of Washington. He’s not only a researcher but also an educator training up young scientists-to-be. But what you really need to know about him is that he’s been able to translate the obtuse language of the academy into a few simple statements. The research on the human brain can be summed up and applied to daily life and Medina writes about it in his book, Brain Rules.

It’s not an option to ignore what’s being gleaned from this research. Cognitive function affects literally everything that happens so it’s recklessly irresponsible to remain uninformed. Rule number ten (of 12) says that “Vision trumps all other senses.” This means that the brain weights what is seen more than what’s heard, tasted, touched or smelled. Every other sense acts as a supporting character to sight, like Diana Ross and the Supremes (or not).

Visual dominance isn’t just what comes in through our eyes, but what our eyes expect to see. Written language is still words and requires the brain to access the secondary language center rather than the primary visual center. Each letter is dissected by the brain into its constituent shapes then matched against patterns for recognition before being recombined into words that have meaning.

“Little Billy was sad because his ice cream cone fell on the ground.” We think about the situation. We process the language and we have a logical understanding of the situation. But all that is communicated with a wordless picture showing an ice cream cone slowly melting on the pavement or the tears welling up in the eyes of a child. Signage isn’t just about conveying information to people but connecting with human beings. Connections are made through vision and image.

Instead of showing streams of text on a billboard, install a Planar EP-Series display that can show full, high-definition video in a light, durable, energy-efficient package. The EP-Series uses edge-lit LED backlight technology to reduce energy cost and high quality LCD components to increase reliability so you can run them all day and night for years.

Or choose the Clarity Matrix™ display wall that marries a grid of displays into one giant screen or into a screen with multiple, independent sections. The slim mounting EasyAxis system means the LCD screens will stick out just four inches into the room. The remote power and video processing mean that the wall will be quiet, cool and won’t require any electrical outlets for the screens.

Take advantage of the primacy of vision. Connect with people in the most powerful way possible.

July 8, 2011

By James Wood

It used to be that you could just paint your name and business information on a shingle and hang it out in front of your shop or office. The simple market method was enough to drive business so that the phrase became an idiom for starting a new venture. Especially in the American West, doctors and lawyers could show up in a new town and immediately have business.

As technology advanced the signs got a bit more complex with colors and designs. Logos and brand recognition became important marketing features. But most marketing was done through tools like the phone book, that’s why there are so many “AAA Locksmiths” around the country. The idea was that being first in the alphabetical phone book listings would drive more business (and it often did). The medium is slightly different, but the effect is nearly the same as hanging out a shingle.

Technology hasn’t paused so now we have amazing tools like the Clarity™ Matrix Display Wall that can show anything you can dream up. You can leverage the high definition, multi-panel display to offer advertising to your clients as well as showing off the features of your new building. But the move from hanging out a shingle to the type of technology available in a Clarity Matrix display is leaving the old paradigms behind. You can show stunning HD pictures of the billboards that your clients have designed. You can even play the commercial’s they’ve recorded for television. The number of advertisements that reach the eyes of people will drastically increase with the ability to change the display constantly and the efficiency built in to be able to run the Clarity Matrix 24/7 with minimal down-time.

Now let your imagination run wild. Consider an interactive display with a touch screen interface so that the people passing the wall-sized display can call up the information they want based on what they’re looking for. When the ads are served up, not by some random rotation, but by the specific request of the people they will be more effective since they meet the specific need of the customer at the time they have the need.

With the Extended Ruggedness and Optics technology, Planar’s Clarity Matrix can stand up to the rigors of being touched and handled thousands of times. The ERO glass is tough, resistant to scratching, bonded directly to the screens of the display wall and supports touch screen input. Planar has skilled partners like Mtek Kiosk who can integrate the Clarity Matrix displays into touch-based kiosks that connect people with content. We’ve moved a long way from hanging out a shingle, but the purpose is still the same as it’s always been. Let us handle the technology so you can handle your business.

July 6, 2011

By James Wood

In his masterful book on visual design, Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte has an extended discussion of “sparklines.” If you don’t already know, a sparkline is a small graphical representation of data, usually in the form of a line graph. Tufte says sparklines are: “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.” Rather than showing all of the information necessary in one, confused graph, the data is broken out into discreet chunks to be analyzed separately. Whether looking at stock performance, medical data or the average rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, sparklines can be used to make the raw numerical data comprehensible at a glance.

According to Tufte, information isn’t enough nor is beautiful design, but both together work in concert to convey more than either could alone. Being able to see at a glance that the DOW was up for the day, but only after steep mid-day losses versus the steady gains experienced by the S&P 500 gives more information than just the end-of-day numbers.

In order for sparklines to work, however, the resolution needs to be very high. Traditional displays are too blocky to show the minute detail necessary for sparklines so Tufte’s brilliant design concept has been unused due to the limitations of technology. With high definition displays the sparklines are finely differentiated and subtly show the vital information.

Clarity Matrix display walls offer a stunning 1920 by 1080 pixels of resolution per display. Each individual component of a Clarity Matrix wall is full HD resolution by itself with over 2 million pixels on a screen. When you start adding up the pixels for a nine panel wall you start seeing the power of an image with 18 million pixels. The finest detail is crisp and sharp.

So, when you need to know an enormous amount of information about dozens or even hundreds of individual items, take advantage of the design genius of Tufte and the technological brilliance of Planar. The Clarity Matrix display will allow you to clearly see the performance of each individual company in the NASDAQ at a glance or the vital statistics for all of the patients in a medical trial laid out together.

June 28, 2011

By James Wood

Google has made its fortune by selling targeted ads. Most people know Google as the search engine company, but they make no money by offering searches. Rather it’s the ads that appear alongside search results that generate income for Google. It’s a brilliant system that takes advantage of the new world of Internet technology.

Prior to the Internet, advertising was focused on getting eyes. The more people who watched a TV show or subscribed to a magazine, the more eyes would see the advertisements and the more valuable the ads are. It’s a game of percentages. Assume that most of the people seeing the ads aren’t interested. Adjust for the target demographic of the show or magazine. Create the highest chance that the ad will match up with people who are interested in the product. Once the percentages are set then it’s a game of getting eyeballs on the ads to drive more customer action.

Google realized that people searching are giving clues to what they want, which helps to reduce guesswork involved in targeting an advertisement. But then they did something revolutionary, they stopped charging for the number of eyes to see the ad and started charging for the number of times an ad got clicked by an interested customer. The terminology is now about the cost-per-click for different ads that Google hosts. The advertisers are happier because they’re paying only for the most interested potential customers. Google is happy because its ad revenue continues to grow.

The transformation that’s happened in the space of private media and advertising is now moving to the public space. Magazines and TV shows are similar to billboards in public areas. The theory is the same. Get eyes on the ad and hope that enough people in that space will be interested. But technology has moved as far beyond a simple billboard as a Google search is beyond a magazine.

Planar’s Clarity™ Matrix Display Wall is made up of high definition, high quality, durable, efficient and reliable displays. The matrix design allows as many screens as you can imagine in any configuration that you can conceive. And, partnering with industry leaders like Mtek Kiosk, Planar can create the real-world equivalent of Google-style ads. Let people select what they want from a touch screen menu on a six foot tall Clarity Matrix display. Then when the suggestions come up for advertisers, the eyes on the ad are interested and motivated. An initial investment in better technology can yield enormous results when every ad displayed is more valuable to customers and to advertising clients.

June 27, 2011

By James Wood

Alton Brown, the host of Good Eats, Iron Chef America and Feasting on Asphalt on the Food Network often shares his prejudice against unitaskers. The only unitasker he allows in his kitchen is the fire extinguisher. If you’re not familiar, a unitasker is a tool that can only perform one function and kitchens are filled with them. Egg slicers, bread makers, pickle spears and lemon zesters are just a few of the offenders that make Alton cringe. There’s no space in the kitchen for these items that get so little use but take up so much space.

In a world that is becoming much more conscious about efficiency, the ethic of no unitaskers can apply far outside the kitchen. You could install billboards to display advertisements then install televisions to shows relevant to your clients and finally you can put in a signage system to show important information. Each unitasker has to be purchased, installed and maintained separately and they can’t do anything different in the future.

Multitaskers offer greater value since they can do more than just one job and that frees up time, space and resources for other things that are important. You could install a Clarity™ Matrix Display Wall that can replace billboards, televisions and information signage – all in one package. Using the Big Picture Plus video processing package (included with each Clarity Matrix installation) you can set some of the panels to show the financial news channel, other panels display the information necessary for your clients and still other panels cycle through ads. Each panel of a Clarity Matrix display configuration can show separate information or it could be incorporated with other panels to stretch data across them. The individual displays have built in sensors that determine where each display is within the wall so that you can easily assign the sections you want to the data you want. With the minuscule 5.7 millimeter gap (with the Clarity Matrix MX 55) between each panel, the Clarity Matrix wall blends into one large screen for when you want to show everything together, but each screen is full 1080p HD quality on its own.

Alton Brown would be proud of the amazing multitasking capabilities of the Clarity Matrix. No unitaskers here.