It’s post ISE, and although I observed this year’s show from afar, I was able to gather a lot of information via my team on the ground in Barcelona, as well as the quantity of videos and interviews produced on the floor and shared on platforms like rAVe and social media like Linked In.

I have long been a critic of most technology trade shows, as I felt they were stuck in the “products on pedestals” mode for far too long. We’ve all walked off the floor into a booth full of little black boxes sitting atop white melamine columns, with a small placard below highlighting a part number and a list of speeds and feeds. This information is valuable to engineers and designers, but is hardly a story worthy of renting 400 square feet and shipping products across the world. Smaller local shows, onsite training, and interactive product webinars and catalogs are much better ways to get your parts and pieces into the hands of engineers and designers.

If you’re going to invest in space and presence at a show, it is better to build a space that relates customer value, supported BY the parts and pieces you manufacture or services you provide. The stand itself should be an experience that relays this business value, the level two tour of the stand would be a technical explanation of how the experience is accomplished and what hardware, software, and methods make the experience come to life, and then the level 3 version includes a private space to discuss specific customer problems and approach to solving them or developing new products to meet those goals.

Given all this, some of the most viral social shares coming out of ISE focused on experiences, supported by hardware and integration.

Lang’s stand experience has probably been shared the most, at least in the feeds that I am exposed to. It featured a multi-tier waterfall, which on the surface, may not sound ultra-creative given all of the waterfall DVLED activations we’ve seen in the past. However, Lang didn’t contain the waterfall to a single plane or technology.  Instead, they used DVLED as a digital backdrop for the landscape, and then utilized transparent DVLED several feet in front that, separating the two digital layers to create parallax as you pass by and depth to the booth.  To take things a step further, they fad custom fabricated, physical landscape elements like rocks, ponds, plants at the base of the walls and waterfall to blend the analog and the digital, creating an experience. It was a great example of how experiences are created by stacking technologies in new ways and by blending several disciplines.

Lang posted a write-up on AVIXA Xchange as well here.

Q- SYS also brought their A game to Barcelona by gamifying their booth and creating an “only here” style experience. They created two escape rooms where an evil engineer has trapped you inside their laboratory and your mission is to get out using your AV savvy and Q-SYS know-how. They of course used their audio, video, and control platforms to create the experience itself, showcasing the power of Q-SYS to distribute video, track presenters and capture video, playback audio, and control doors, lighting, and all of the elements of the escape room itself.  They also allocated and posted scores to let the best of the best highlight their prowess in their escapes. Again, this experience had to not only leverage hardware, but set work, physical elements, and bespoke content.

Here’s a Linked In post to give you a peek into the experience.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/qsc-audio-products-llc_qsysescaperoom-ise2025-ise25-activity-7292525601846878210-Vg5x/

Finally, if you haven’t heard of 7th Sense, they are a company you should know, especially if your company needs the video processing horsepower required to create amazing experiences. Of course, just making an awesome video processor wouldn’t have earned them a place in this breakdown, it was how they showcased the video processing that got them here. Imagine taking a white 3-dimensional object and moving it around while in real time several projectors accurately map digital imagery on top of it in real time as it moves. This is what 7th Sense brought to the ISE floor, and it is nothing short of inspiring.

The objects have to be captured by a camera, XYZ coordinates need to be collected as well as orientation, and then the processor has to generate content for several time synced projectors to map these objects accurately as they continually change position and orientation. Oh yeah, and it has to do it for 2 separate objects at once independently.

The end result is something irresistible to stop, watch, and ponder if you were moving from stand to stand. Of course, this again required special fabrication, multiple technologies, and customized content to succeed.