Ever keen to try out new things (and being veterans of signagelive, C-nario and even Mac Mini integration now), we decided to use Wirespring’s EasyStart digital signage system to power the Christie Digital MicroTiles 1×5 column that will be on our Blogger Lounge at ISE2010 next week.
This platform has not been used before to power a MicroTiles display, so we were interested to see how easy it would be to put the two together.
We wanted to drive the column at its native resolution to show the tiles playing content at the best quality possible. As Alex Hughes wrote a couple of weeks ago, the content will be mainly WayFinding in nature, and is specifically designed for this shape, in a similar way to content already showcased by Christie in previous private demonstrations, and at the official launch in New York last year.
The challenge was to make sure the player could display the content in the very non-PC-standard video mode required. We had the parameters that we knew should work and were ready to plug them in to the system manually, and wait for the inevitable mess on screen if the settings needed to be further tweaked.
The MicroTiles that we were using (behaving as all good displays should) actually sent the correct details directly to the EasyStart system AND all we had to do was to select the right resolution from the list, and voila, there was our nice high quality picture looking good.
Wirespring’s Bill Gerba, a veteran of such interfacing challenges, was moved to comment “I’m really, really impressed with the ECU work Christie did. It’s still common to see mass-production screens give back nonsense EDID data, so the fact that these low-volume and highly configurable screens can do it perfectly is pretty amazing to me”
Mind you, he did add “it’s gotten to the point where I’m generally impressed by *anything* that works as it should… I think that means I’ve been in the tech game too long”
What we would like to see now is this type of WayFinding column sold as a complete solution: MicroTiles, ECU, Enclosure, WireSpring / EasyStart linux system, some templates and maybe even some sample LEFT and RIGHT ARROW style (WayFinding) content.
Alex Hughes from Amigo Digital will be writing about the content next week, but of course if you are at ISE2010, please come along to our booth 10N118 and have a look at it for yourselves.
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