Video walls – a wall of monitors displaying large quantities of information at a single glance - have traditionally been the domain of air-traffic control, NASA, television stations, and big budget marketers, but no longer. Hiperwall’s high-performance, low-cost video wall system uses a software solution that is hardware agnostic (meaning it can work with any size, resolution or type of display, whether it’s LCD, plasma, CRT even rear-projection) and allows non-technical users to manage the display of video and data feeds using just a mouse. This is a killer app in that it enables complex information display at a fraction of the cost of previously!!
Used to view large quantities of information at a single glance on a “wall” of monitors, video wall technology has previously been considered the exclusive domain of large organizations because of high costs and complexity. However, the Hiperwall software-centric solution requires only ordinary PCs and monitors and a standard Ethernet network, making the technology accessible to small-to-medium businesses and state and local government agencies for the first time.
The Hiperwall system displays still images up to 1GB resolution or larger, HD videos, HD streaming content and PC applications, turning a bank of monitors into an ultra-high resolution video wall. The system enables multiple feeds to be displayed on the wall simultaneously and allows the user to reposition and resize each feed as easily as moving and resizing windows on a PC desktop. A feed can be scaled up for viewing on several monitors or the entire wall instantly depending upon the user’s discretion.
For example, the Western States Information Network, an agency that provides support to U.S. law enforcement operations nationwide and an early customer of Hiperwall’s, uses its system to view communications, CNN news feeds, surveillance, maps, and events and conflicts tables at the same time due to the multi-source streaming and configuration flexibility.
“Hiperwall’s pioneering video wall system not only offers a solution that’s easy to install, easy to use and easy to afford, it offers features and performance capabilities previously unseen in this space,” said Hiperwall CEO Jeff Greenberg.
“Based on its completely scalable architecture, the Hiperwall system is uniquely suited to meet the visual communication requirements of many diverse applications,” Greenberg added. “These include command and control rooms at government, military, utility, transportation installations as well as use on trading floors and in digital signage, medical/scientific imaging, aerial imaging, broadcast, fleet management and more.”
In addition to locating and sizing data feeds on the video wall, the feature-rich Hiperwall software allows a variety of custom display configurations, including the ability to:
• Reproduce on the video wall everything on the screen of any network-attached PC• Designate any portion of the wall to cycle through any sequence of images, videos, streams or virtually any data from the PC • Rotate any piece of content to any orientation• Adjust the transparency of any piece of content from fully opaque to fully transparent, particularly helpful for visual overlays• Adjust the color shading of any content
The Hiperwall system is “hardware agnostic,” meaning it can work with any type of display, whether it’s LCD, plasma, CRT or rear-projection, of any size and resolution, as well as any PC that meets the minimum requirements of today’s standard PC, including dual-core process, 1GB RAM, GbE Ethernet and 256MB video memory.
The PCs can be connected together using almost any layer 2 Gigabit switch as well.
Hiperwall started in 2005 as a research project at UC Irvine’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). It was designed to be a collaborative visualization platform capable of displaying any type of content in real time. The Hiperwall system is now available through VARs, network integrators, system integrators, IT consultants, AV integrators and A/V rental companies.