Video control software has come a long way in the last few years, writes Steve Murphy, Managing Director of control room audio visual product firm eyevis UK.
It’s driven by the continued demand for ever more sophisticated tools and techniques to keep operations centres fully in the picture. I’d like to think we have been at the forefront of these industry developments, working with our clients to ensure they have operations centres and network management centres that really work for them.
As a result, today we are seeing video wall controllers and video wall display layouts ‘driven’ by incidents or scenarios that the control centre needs to respond to. That means the increasing integration to external systems and alarms and new ways of alerting operation centre managers to the events and incidents they need to move on quickly.
For our security sector clients, that may mean flagging up on a special operations centre’s video walls when a vehicle they are tracking is on the move again – coupled with instant images from surveillance cameras showing its current location. For network management centres it may mean the smallest of changes in building temperatures, ventilation and humidity being flashed on the video wall, allowing operators to act quickly to preventing the costly effects of overheating on high-tech, valuable kit such as computer servers.
At the heart of this approach, which continues to evolve alongside control room design developments, are industry acclaimed products such as the Netpix video wall controller and Eyecon video wall control software. We work with our clients to ensure that our technology is put to the best use for them and is applied in a way that delivers the solution to their needs. What we are seeing today is all a long way from earlier versions of video wall controllers and video control software which only allowed operators to drag and drop specific images they needed to view on the video wall.
More and more operators have asked for the tools to allow this ‘driven’ approach to video wall display layouts. They include alarm management modules and video walls that react automatically. Managers of operations centres that may have multiple video walls in different rooms have also been behind some of these latest advances in technology. In special operations centres there can be up to ten or more rooms in use – each with a video wall or a number of displays connected to the video wall controller.
Here, senior personnel are looking for a method to see what is being displayed on each video wall as a way of giving them an overview of what’s happening. As a result eyevis UK has developed a live remote video wall view, so they can see an image of what is being shown on every display connected to the video wall controller. It is all about keeping an eye on everything you need to see as being kept in the picture enables security staff to do a better and more effective job.
