I am in Amsterdam attending the ISE 2013 exhibition, and where we just concluded the innaugural Megapixel Summit event. While desktops, public signage, rental and staging, visualization and lots of other applications have used multiple displays for a long time, it seems to me that there may be a shift in expectations going on. I am wondering if a single display solution is almost becoming a thing of the past for most professional applications – and if that trend will translate into the more broader consumer market.
And I am not alone as projectiondesign’s David Aleksandersen raised this same question in his talk at the Megapixel Summit. Anyone walking the trade show floor might come to the same conclusion too. Everywhere you look there are multiple desktop monitor solutions with the mounts to facilitate this, blended projection systems are everywhere; traditional tiled LCD walls adorn many booths and rear-projection building blocks, like the microtiles from Christie and the omninSHAPES devices from eyevis, allow novel and creative uses of multiple display elements.
While much of these application are for public spaces and professional uses, ordinary personal desktops are going in this direction too. I bet many of you are now using two monitors on your desktop. And some of you may have a projector or large flat panel in your office for small collaborations. But sharing content across those displays can be tricky. Which brings me to my main point: If multiple display use is the new norm, we have a lot of work to do to make this easy to use for mass adoption.
In the day and a half we ran the Megapixel Summit it was clear that there are many ways to source content, to manage it and to display it across large digital canvases. The graphic below illustrates some of the complexity where content in many resolutions and formats needs to be made available on a variety of displays or variable resolution over various connections. How do you do that easily and maintain the best image quality?
Clearly control rooms, live events, digital signage, collaborations, product design and visualization and many other applications are solving this problem. These may be large arrays of discrete display elements or seamless (or near-seamless) palettes of display surface. And they don’t have to be 4:3 or 16:9 shapes: in fact, often they are not. Look around ISE and Megapixel Summit and you will realize there are dozens of ways to generate, process, distribute and display content on multiple displays. In addition, many of these applications are now adding some sort of interactivity and/or content sharing utility. That can get really confusing really fast.
So think about that. Isn’t that exactly what we will come to expect on our desktop for our jobs, but also at home? We will want this information and entertainment across all our platforms – the anywhere, anytime theme, but we also want more pixels and a bigger unified digital display canvas. This theme is evident in the large TVs that are the hottest selling segment of the TV industry. Could tiled displays or blended projectors become a fixture of homes and small offices as prices come down? I don’t know, but it is an interesting thought to ponder.
In the meantime, there are many professional and commercial multiple display applications to work on, which is why ISE is such a big show – and why we organized the Megapixel Summit. These solutions remain complex so anything the industry can do to increase education and simplify the solutions will go a long way toward increasing the proliferation of multiple display solutions – which by the way, is not a commodity sale so something most integrators should welcome. It is going to be fun to watch.
At ISE, Crestron launched its new CLWI integrated in-wall wireless dimming and switching control solutions. CLWI offers the perfect entry-level product to attract new home and building automation business.
Well, it is 4:30pm here in a rainy, windswept Amsterdam, and I'm just winding up my second day here at ISE. The show is still open, but I've beaten the massive crowd for a taxi, got my blank receipt (there are no IRS subscribers that I know of) and am sitting down to edit my pictures and interviews for the day into a special edition of "the Week", on rAVe Radio. It will be posted in a few hours, along with hundreds more live videos that the amazing rAVe crew has shot today. I refer to this crew as "The Red Bull Set", and nobody who didn't have their energy level and enthusiasm could possibly accomplish what they're doing today - which is essentially to bring you an entire tradeshow, the largest of its type in the world, by doing booth videos everywhere, getting demonstrations by experts of all the new gear. Seriously, I'm biased, of course... but you STILL have to check out 
In the meantime, I've gotten several good interviews in the can, and a bunch of observations on the show and the market, which I'm sitting down to turn into an onsite Special Edition of "The Week". I spoke with some great folks at Christie, AMX and Cisco, and I'm going to bring you some of the highlights of those discussions over the next couple of shows. I also spoke with Scott Wills, Director of International Education and Member Services for InfoComm International, about the training being offered, the partnership with Cedia, and the show itself.
