Control Room Trends 2023

VuWall’s Founder and CEO, Paul Vander Plaetse, gives insights during this exclusive interview, about the trends that he’s seen in the Video Wall Control Room market. Learn about what we can expect to see in 2023 and beyond. Understand how innovative technology and the drop in display prices is affecting the deployments of control rooms in new and emerging markets such as process control, logistics, security and cybersecurity.

Hello and welcome to another podcast episode brought to you by VuWall. I’ll be your host for today Gabrielle and right now I’m so thrilled to be joined by the CEO and founder of VuWall whose name is Paul Vander Plaetse, I’m so very excited to be with him today because we’re going to be talking about emerging Trends in the industry so Paul welcome.

“Thanks for having me”

Absolutely, so to start us off what trends do we see emerging in 2023 and Beyond?

“So the trends we see are smaller control rooms but more distributed across different locations of the same companies, and same organizations. And a more interactive video wall so where operators can directly interact with the video wall and share content with their colleagues and we’ve been working on solutions to facilitate that where the operator has keyboard and mouse control on the different types of sources available. And can have keyboard and mouse control over the video wall and you know with the technology evolving it’s possible to have content that comes from different occasions today in a control room all the content that is encoded or is IT content coming from the cloud.

So it’s available anywhere there’s information is available from everywhere and also people expect to be able to share information anywhere so from one control room or one control center to the other, people want to easily manage the sharing of information. That’s where with our TRx software we’ve developed a solution that’s central and that allows to control different content on different locations and depending on the user rights you control only that location. If you’re a manager you control everything. And in terms of Technology we’ve developed a technology that operators can have keyboard and mouse control and use it on their desk like a personal video wall where they can see their content on their large display with the same technology that we’re using for the video wall itself so for the user, for the installers, and for
the people maintaining the IT departments, maintaining that they only have to understand these products like our PAK video wall processor. It’s a modular product that goes for the operator and for the video wall as well and the TRx Central software also.”

It’s becoming less and less almost like an option and more of something that companies need to prioritize because they’re seeing the competition and I know for me I mean it’s easier to see things visually because if you’re given a long long document of logistics it’s a lot harder to digest that information rather than seeing it visually.

“So another Market is also process control where there’s a lot of information to deal with or again different information stock management machine, you know all the Machinery to the you know the production floor.. there’s a lot of shifts you know the work shifts and all that so those are functions that can gain a lot with productivity but a few years ago a video wall is way too expensive to justify the cost but now with the cost of displays going down and even the video wall control systems are more easy to use now so people are adopting that and they’re discovering that they’re gaining in productivity.”

Yeah it justifies the cost almost, well you know where does view all kind of fit into this landscape that we’re painting here?

“So VuWall is.. well we’ve been Innovative since the since the start, we were an early adopter of commercial off the Shelf Hardware combined with our software to build video wall processors and so now we continue to promote that in markets where people don’t know what a video wall is or who are. Impressed by a video wall they don’t even think they can afford it so we go one market at the time. These days the logistics markets is interesting, another Market is security that’s also very interesting. Cyber security is also a growing Market there’s a lot of demand there and again those are not big control centers like you could see in a utility company. With more small centers, 3×2 video walls but where operators need to see information together to make decisions.”

Yeah because you almost think like for me when I think video wall you think of those massive displays like the AT&T District, I think of something dramatic and large but a lot of times the Practical use cases I mean it’s a smaller TV size one up on your wall for your operators to see well. Will the use of coordination and operation centers in transportation and Logistics particularly experience an increase in the next year you think with everything we’re seeing?

“Yes. And along with that the way operators work they actually want to interact with the video wall also they expect to interact with it. In traditional control centers you would have a video wall as mostly a big status static dashboard where you see all the information and The Operators just work on their information and they look at the dashboard. Now people are able to use, to share the information they have on
their desk, and easily share it on the video wall or to talk with their their colleague and that can go with smaller videos smaller teams and the dashboard. The video wall is much more Dynamic than in huge control rooms.”

So you can screencast your own material that makes it a lot more usable. Well are the use of video walls and control rooms are those becoming increasingly more attractive and feasible would you say like to these companies?

“Yeah, yeah 100% so a keyboard and mouse control even we have some customers they want keyboard and mouse control of what’s on the video wall so they can share information and they can use their keyboard and mouse to work on the video wall itself so there’s a merge of
these two worlds. The operator world and the video wall world. The operator is typically the IT world and video wall is traditionally AV but those two worlds are merging today as well as the technology so it’s an interesting time.”

Yeah no for sure I didn’t even think about it that way it’s kind of a blend of Industries kind of going in together. Well that wraps up the conversation for today so thank you Paul for discussing all the emerging Trends in the industry right now. And as always if you’d like to learn more please visit vuwall.com and look for this podcast wherever it is you get your podcast at. I’ve been your host Gabrielle thanks for tuning in.