OK, so I took my first spin around the InfoComm floor just to get a feel for what is out there this year.

To be fair, I didn’t do a deep dive with anyone yet, so I am going to reserve my judgments and just offer some praise at this time.

I found my self stopped inadvertently at two places on the floor.

Walking through the collection of audio companies in the back corner, I passed several booth in a box set ups, and then found myself looking at a custom speaker array / art piece, complete with organic, undulating waves and some soft LED backlighting.  It hung on a wall, not of prefabricated trade show melamine, but concrete gray back board, mixed with metal and concrete footers, and topped with antique wooden slats.  I imagine if the Apple Store and Restoration Hardware hooked up one night and had a Love Child, this is what it would look like.  It was very fitting, and I would have expected nothing less from Noah Kaplan and his custom speaker company Leon.  Noah’s sense of design and craftsmanship allow Leon to continually take simple problems and match them to high quality, intuitive solutions that make us all say “Why didn’t I think of that?”  Stop by booth #1787 and take a breath of fresh air.

Speaking of air, what is tall, has four blades, uses wind to create power, and is the national symbol of Holland? It’s a windmill, and there is one on display on the InfoComm 2013 floor. No, it’s not part of the GreenAV showcase, it’s in the TV One booth #3931. So what is a video wall processor company doing with a windmill you ask? They took four screen wall displays and created an array that spins. The real trick however is in how their Corio Master Mini Screen Wall Server tracks that movement, to adjust the source image so that as the screens spin, the image itself remains static, and the blades slice through the larger source image, revealing new pieces as they go around. To take it a step further, they have input a live camera feed into a picture in picture window on two of the blades, and are rotating those with the blades, keeping the windows level as the blades spin. I don’t know that this is a new feature, or even if it is unique to TV One, but I do know that the presentation is really cool and worth looking at.

More to come, but as a first pass, these are two visual standouts for sure.