Well, the show opened with the usual ribbon cutting, and we are off and running. I have done my first turn around the floor, and here are my morning observations:

First, I ran into David Labuskes, InfoComm’s executive director. Besides a nice conversation about the friendly “sibling rivalries” among some of our mutual friends, he mentioned that they are expecting a number of attendees “north of 40,000” which does indeed make this the largest InfoComm show on record. Also, we had a brief chat about the way VR is changing our industry. More on this later.

Then, I spent some time in the new InfoComm Innovation Showcase, an area for which rAVe is the Media Sponsor. This showcase highlights a number of innovative new companies exhibiting for the first time at InfoComm, and I must say the exhibitors were well chosen. Among them were:

Domotz, where I had a long talk with Seth Rubenstein, director of business development. Domotz is a network monitoring system ideally tailored for the AV installation and systems support area of the business. It is based around several pieces of unique hardware that provide for network monitoring and discovery. You might be familiar with their free app, Fing. I know I certainly am, and I was impressed that the professional application seemed to feature the ease of use and automatic discovery of the Fing application. After a brief look at the application, I have marked the Domotz exhibit for a deeper look, later on in the show.

Another interesting exhibit in the Innovation Showcase was Invict. This is an application that uses a number of newer technologies to make conference documentation easier and more complete. Based around a microphone system and recording infrastructure for the meeting space, and using biometric identification of participants, it documents, basically, “who said what”, automatically directing the camera view to the speaker, and producing a keyword searchable database of the speakers and their input. It also works with distant participants, such as videoconference-based attendees. This keyword and participant database can direct a user directly to the pertinent parts of a meeting’s recording, and they tell me that full transcription based on one of the industry’s top transcription engines is “coming soon”. All in all, an impressive product, and certainly one that belongs in this particular showcase.

Later on, I am going to spend some time in the Immersive Technology exhibits, where, as I mentioned before, an impressive crew from the University of North Carolina is showing an immersion dome of 360 video, created in Unity, one of the most powerful simulation programs. Plus, at 6 p.m., Gary Kayye and I will be wrapping up the first day of the show, live on Facebook, so stay tuned.

JRR