THIS IS A PROMOTED POST FROM AURORA MULTIMEDIA

Aurora Multimedia has had control systems for years — aimed mostly at controlling their own produce line in systems. But, at ISE 2019, they debuted something they are calling the world’s first open-platform control system in their ReAX control line — and it’s compatible with Windows, Android and Linux. Using JavaScript for the control engine and HTML 5 and JavaScript for serving up the front-end design and layout for the touchscreens and websites, ReAX is defined as open-platform by Aurora’s founder, Paul Harris, as he’s willing to allow his competition to adopt their IP via a ReAX standard organization. His hope is that this will allow for a standardization of interface control modules for RS232 control, IR and IP-based control libraries and, thus an open, but custom, configurable control system that can be used universally within any room. We were impressed by ReAX, which is why we awarded it Best ProAV Control System Interface Concept as part of our Best of ISE 2019 awards.

Although at InfoComm 2018, Aurora showed this as a tech demo, at ISE, they actually had a line-up of products including 7″ and 10″ touchscreens that can be mounted and used in landscape or portrait modes — embedded with quad-core processors, RXC1 and RXC3 Linux-based control engines with a varying number of relays, I/O, IR and RS232 ports and LAN ports. Both of these are aimed at room-based control. And, for enterprise-wide control, Aurora built a ReAX Server appliance that uses an i5 Intel Pentium processor with a 128G SSD drive that’s capable of controlling an entire facility — it runs the ReAX control engine.

Finally, they launched something called ReAX Studio — a WYSIWYG-based system designer software that allows you to design and configure systems graphically and then it will automatically generate the JavaScript and HTML5 code so you can send it to whichever control engine you’re using to control your system. ReAX Server is simply serving itself up as a webpage so, in reality, it’s cloud-based programming or a premise-based system.

If Aurora competitors, especially Crestron and Extron, adopt this as a platform for future control, this would allow for cross-platform interoperability between systems. No other control company has ever designed an open-platform system (and offered it up for their competition to also use) so this will be interesting to watch. At a minimum, companies like Kramer, Atlona, Savant and ZeeVee should consider partnering with ReAX as an alternative to their proprietary systems. I’m betting Paul Harris has had this thought too.

What do you think fo this concept?

Oh, and here’s a video we shot on this at ISE: