Posted on July 19th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Products, Technology, dlp, l c d, useful technology, Screens, 3 d, plasma flat panel, corporative, media.
GE’s WattStation™ is an easy-to-use electric vehicle (EV) charger designed to help accelerate the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) by significantly decreasing time needed for vehicle charging. Its smart grid-enabled technology could also help utility companies manage the impact of EVs on the local and regional grids.
On average the WattStation™ decreases EV charging time from 12-18 hours to as little as 4-8 hours compared to standard charging, assuming a 24 kWh battery and a full-cycle charge. In addition, the design will enable integration into the electrical distribution system, offering an end-to-end integrated EV infrastructure solution of electrical distribution products.
Designer: GE Ecoimagination and Yves Behar for Fuseproject
Posted on June 4th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: corporative, events.
The AufRuhr 1225! exhibition, which runs in the LWL-Museum for Archaeology in Herne from 27 February to 28 November, promises an unusual look at the Ruhr. This project, conceived by ATELIER BRÜCKNER for the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010 takes a look back at the Middle Ages, when the region between the rivers Ruhr and Emscher was one of those with the most castles in the German-speaking world.
With a floor space of around 1500 square metres, the exhibition brings together over 800 valuable objects, to include the famous Cappenberg head reliquary (dated around 1155) and a gold and silver-plated bust of Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne (dated around 1500). These exhibits are incorporated into a dramatically staged tour, illustrating everyday life in the Middle Ages. Ten individually designed exhibition cubes are dedicated to separate topics like the Church and the Pope, knights and castles but also to family and travelling. Historical characters, presented as life-size cut-outs, guide visitors towards these topics.
The central theme throughout the exhibition is formed by the events surrounding the death of Engelbert, Archbishop of Cologne. He was killed in 1225 in an ambush in what is today’s Ruhr region. This ambush, staged as a spectacular prologue to the exhibition, destabilized the entire region and resulted in more castles being built. Over 400 castles, which are presented in a separate installation, are still in evidence in the Ruhr of today.
One of the most impressive sites in today’s Ruhr are still the ruins of the castle that belonged to Count Friedrich von Isenberg, the alleged murderer of the archbishop. It is the focal point of another exhibition area which is concerned with the sensory perception of the Middle Ages. Museum visitors both young and old can immerse themselves in life in a castle around 1300 in the “White Hall” of the Herne Museum using interactive and explorative means. Here history is conveyed vividly and emotively.
Thematic Cube: Saint and Monastery. Photo: ATELIER BRÜCKNER
Thematic Cube: Travelling. Photo: ATELIER BRÜCKNER
AufRuhr Ritter artikel
Reiter Foto LWL-Museum fuer Archaeologie Herne
LWL-Museum für Archäologie, Herne
27 February - 28 November 2010
Tue, Wed, Fri: 9-17.00, Thur 9-19.00
Sat, Sun and public holidays 11-18.00
2-6 €, family ticket 12 €, group concessions
For more informations:
www.aufruhr1225.de
Posted on May 4th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Products, Technology, useful technology, more, not 24 hours, Screens, 3 d, education, corporative, events, media, Markets.
MIT Technology Review names 10 technologies that will change the World
Here we are in the Information Age. Never before has the flow of ideas, innovation and new technologies been so strong, so much so that it’s hard to imagine what the world will be like in 10, 20 or 50 years time. So which of today’s fledgling technologies will have a fundamental impact on the way we live our lives in the future? MIT’s Technology Review has turned its attention to this question with the release of its annual list of 10 emerging technologies and it makes thought provoking reading.
Technology Review 2010 TR10 - technologies likely to change the world
Solar fuel. Joule Biotechnologies’ Noubar Afeyan has created genetically engineered microorganisms that can turn sunlight into ethanol or diesel — a feat that could allow biofuels to compete with fossil fuels on both cost and scale. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=563
Mobile 3-D. Recent box-office hits like Avatar and Up have added to the growing popularity of 3-D movies. Julien Flack of Dynamic Digital Depth is leading the charge to take 3-D mainstream not only on TVs, but also smart phones and mobile devices, through a technology that can convert existing 2-D content to 3-D on the fly. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=559
Dual action antibodies.Genentech’s Germaine Fuh has found a promising way to fight conditions like cancer and AIDs through dual-action antibodies that give patients two drugs for the price of one, offering the promise of drugs that work better and cost less. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=560
Real-time search. Amit Singhal is leading Google’s quest to mine social networks for up-to-the-second search results that offer the same relevance and quality of traditional Web searches. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=556
Light-trapping photovoltaics. By depositing nanoparticles of silver on the surface of a thin-film cell, Kylie Catchpole of the Australian National University has found a way to boost the cells’ efficiency — an advance that could help make solar power more competitive with fossil fuels. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=558
Engineered stem cells. James Thomson of Cellular Dynamics and the University of Wisconsin has potentially revolutionized the way we screen drugs and study disease by providing a way to make — in the test tube — any kind of cell from patients with different diseases. http://www.technologyreview.com/article/25152/
Social TV. People are already trying to combine their social networks with TV, using laptops and smart phones to comment on live events like the Oscars or the Olympics. MIT’s Marie-José Montpetit is working on social TV — a way to seamlessly combine the active experience of social networks with the more passive experience of traditional TV viewing. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=564
Green concrete. The production of cement is responsible for about 5 percent of global carbon emissions. Novacem’s Nikolaos Vlasopoulos has created a cement that is a carbon “sink” rather than a source. His innovation could greatly reduce the global carbon emissions that result from cement production. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=562
Implantable electronics. Tufts University’s Fiorenzo Omenetto is developing implantable electronic devices that can be used to deliver drugs, stimulate nerves, monitor biomarkers, and more. And once they’ve done their job, they almost completely dissolve away. More info here or http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=557
Cloud programming. At the University of California, Berkeley, Joseph Hellerstein is creating better software for building cloud applications, and this could herald a new wave of applications for social media analysis, enterprise computing, or sensor networks monitoring for earthquake warning signs. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=561
More info on each of the 2010 TR10 (and previous years) is now online and will be featured in the May/June edition of Technology Review.
Posted on April 19th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Products, Technology, useful technology, more, Screens, control room, corporative, critical decisions.
Ensuring that the workplace is designed for maximum efficiency, accuracy and comfort is particularly important in command and control centres, as Ian McMurray finds out
If Wikipedia is to be believed – and it isn’t always – ergonomics have been with us for at least the past 2,500 years, with Hippocrates describing how a surgeon’s workplace should be designed and his tools arranged. It is defined as the science of ensuring that the workplace, and the tools used for work, provide the optimum characteristics for doing the job.
Given that, in many command/control installations, decision-making is often critical, it should come as no surprise to find that ergonomics play a vital role in room, system and operator interface design. Maximising operator effectiveness requires a twofold approach that not only makes relevant information as accessible as possible, but also minimises the fatigue that can be an inevitable corollary of the control room environment.
It is generally agreed that, of all the information we take in, some 80% comes through our eyes – implying that, while control room design is a complex issue involving a broad range of factors, it is the screens that receive the most attention.
“For years, the focus was on brightness and resolution,” notes Guy Van Wijmeersch, design director, control rooms at Barco, who has written an impressive white paper on the topic of control room design. “But there are limits on human perception, and by the beginning of this century, we had all the brightness and resolution we needed. That’s when our focus shifted to maximising contrast under standard ambient light conditions: contrast is something to which the human visual system is very sensitive.”
Bright future
Brighter images have an important advantage in the control room environment. “Because control rooms now have brighter displays, it means that the rooms no longer need to be operated in low-light conditions – and that’s highly beneficial for operator alertness,” points out Mike Garrido, product manager for Multiviewers at Harris Broadcast Communications.
“We have introduced new high-gain screens that are designed to deliver excellent contrast ratio, and the best possible viewing angle,” says David Griffiths, market development manager for control rooms at Christie EMEA. “They’re designed to allow information to be presented to operators in the most appropriate manner for fast, accurate decision-making.”
Another area of focus for manufacturers is colour accuracy and consistency, and creating what looks as much like a single, large display as possible. “Maintaining accurate colour and brightness performance across the entire display is key in reducing operator fatigue,” says Ron Schouwenburg, product marketing manager, visual display systems at Mitsubishi Electric Benelux. “Even small differences in performance and screen geometry mean that operators perceive the display as individual screens and this has been shown to increase fatigue.”
He goes on to note the advent of LED illumination in cube displays as being an important development, given LED’s ability to reproduce a wider colour gamut: “The difference between orange and red could mean life or death in something like a railway control room.”
Eric Hénique, director of marketing and international sales at eyevis, identifies another advantage of LED illumination. “Traditional lamp-lit systems, especially those featuring a colour wheel, are prone to flicker,” he says, “and that has been demonstrated to be a cause of operator fatigue.
LED-lit cubes have solved that problem.” And, as Griffiths notes, eliminating the colour wheel also reduces the ‘rainbow’ effect for which DLP-based systems are known, and provides higher reliability and lower cost of ownership as well as improving colour accuracy.
Seamless scenes
Colour fidelity and consistency, contrast, resolution, brightness and lack of flicker all play key roles in presenting easy-to-see information without tiring operators. Yet another contributor is to minimise perceived gaps between each cube in the wall. “The best rear-projection DLP videowall displays can now be tiled together with an image-to-image gap less than half a millimetre,” points out Steve Seminario, senior product director for Planar’s videowall products.
“That gives the wall a virtually seamless look – and means that windows can be positioned and sized with less regard for the mullions.” He goes on to point out that configuring more, larger screens in a wall rather than fewer, smaller ones is often preferred in order to minimise the appearance of mullions.
Hénique says the mullions issue is a reason why flatpanel technologies continue to struggle to find a foothold in the command/control market – together with their 16:9 aspect ratio, which does not fit well in applications such as supervisory control and data acquisition that were designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio.
The AV systems also have a key role to play in two other elements of control room design that can have a significant impact on operator effectiveness: heat and noise. A warm room – or, to counter it, the continuous background drone of fans, whether from equipment or from air-conditioning – create conditions where drowsiness will almost certainly occur.
“There are two ways of dealing with those issues,” says Quirin Stamminger, head of marketing and international relations at Hetec. “One is that products like our video and KVM extenders and our multiview KVM switch produce almost no heat, so they only need fan cooling in high-ambient temperatures,” he says. “The second is to ensure that as many of the heat-generating systems as possible are installed in a separate server room with its own air-conditioning system.”
Flexible systems
How and where information is presented on the control room wall is of vital importance. Vital information needs, of course, to have priority, and provision needs to be made for exceptions such as alarms. Because no two control rooms are the same, manufacturers have responded by designing the maximum possible flexibility into their offerings. Manufacturers such as Mitsubishi Electric have broad and adaptable product ranges. “Versatility is the most important attribute we can bring to our display products,” says Schouwenburg. “What we have done is to develop a very flexible architecture to enable a systems integrator to deliver the most appropriate solution.”
“Our job is to provide videowalls that are customisable enough to perform well in the environment,” agrees Seminario, “regardless of viewing configuration, room size, ambient lighting, video source requirements and so on.”
There can be little doubt, though, that the flexibility each end user needs in order to maximise the effectiveness of control room operators mostly lies behind the screens with the wall control system.
Wall control
“The wall controller plays a key role in a productive operating environment,” says Rainer Stiehl, vice president for marketing at Extron Europe. “The wall controller hardware and user interface should work together effectively and be capable of managing the image data efficiently, while delivering high-quality images on-screen. The operator needs to be able to concentrate on the information on-screen and not how it gets to the displays. Ideally, the wall controller will feature a simple-to-operate user interface that mirrors a normal computer operator environment.”
“The ability to resize information, reproduce imagery at full frame rate and instantly select screen presets all help to improve decision making,” says Griffiths. “Flexibility, ease of use and expandability are watch words for our controllers.”
Van Wijmeersch sounds a note of warning, however. “Data has to be shown in the right context and should be related to other elements to become useful information,” he says, “so having a very flexible way of putting content on a large wall has some danger as the information can be cluttered. As such we’ve developed wall management software that can help in organising data and video in a structured way, improving the context, the quality and the usability of the presented information.”
Are there new AV technologies that can further improve control room ergonomics? It seems unlikely, at least in the near term. The rest of the AV industry is talking about 3D, gesture recognition and multitouch – but it’s hard to see how those will find a place in command/control environments. Inevitably, though, much depends on the specifics of the application.
“If you’re talking about a creative environment in a war room context with multiple experts, for example, then touch and multitouch could be a great help,” says Van Wijmeersch. “Perhaps in the future, creating a full virtual environment rather than an overview will provide a place for 3D.”
“Yes, touch displays might be an option for command/control tables in control rooms,” says Hénique, “but touch control of a wall 5m wide by 3m high doesn’t make much sense.”
Stamminger agrees that to have someone standing in front of a wall, obscuring the view of others, isn’t appropriate. And 3D? “After watching a 3D movie, many people complain of headaches or itching eyes,” he says. “That’s hardly conducive to good decision making. The technology would need to improve significantly.” He, in common with others, makes a distinction between what might be feasible on the main wall and what would work on each operator’s individual workstation, where touch control is increasingly used.
“We launched a multitouch option for our Seventy Series cubes at ISE this year,” notes Schouwenburg, “and we feel that its intuitive nature could be useful in certain command and control applications.” He goes on to point out, though, the fundamental importance of reliability. “For that reason, I’m not sure gesture recognition yet has a role to play.”
Interactive operations
But there is one area in which control rooms certainly mirror the rest of the AV world. “The videowall is becoming the interactive wall,” points out Garrido. “With a click of a mouse, the operators in a control room can interact with all devices without having to move to a different workstation or even change screens. They can access servers to replay video streams, access a camera to move or zoom, or even call up any PC in the facility to access important information. The software and processing power in the wall controller is making the operator’s job much easier – and therefore making the operator more effective.”
The picture that emerges is that the AV industry is playing a significant role in ensuring that mission-critical installations and their staff are able to perform at the optimum level. “Control room technologies continue to evolve, including displays, switching, processing, distribution, control systems, and even furniture,” says Stiehl.
“But, while technologies have improved, the best contribution to improving ergonomics in a command and control environment is collaboration between all the companies involved – manufacturers, integrators, architects – so as manufacturers, we’re not in direct control of the many factors involved with proper control room design that has human factors at its heart, but our contribution can be significant.”
www.eyevis.de www.floria.com www.renovatiofloria.com
more info: http://renovatiofloria.com/indra.html
Posted on January 18th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Products, Technology, dlp, l c d, lcos, useful technology, education, corporative, events, media, Home Theatre.
Event horizon
In his annual round-up, Dr Geoff Archenhold looks back at a momentous year of developments in LED technology and suggests that this is the dawn of a new era.
The lighting community finds itself in interesting times lumbered with the challenges of the economic credit crunch on the one hand and the disruptive change that LED technology is forcing upon established lighting manufacturers on the other. Over the last few years I have listened to many statements from all parts of the lighting supply chain stating that LED technology is not yet mature enough to be considered as a mainstream lighting technology. However during 2009 the numbers of LED doubters have dwindled significantly which proves one thing - 2009 was the year that LED technology was adopted as the future lighting technology for the global lighting industry - it was an event horizon!
Figure : The high performance Cool, Neutral and Warm White LED array from Bridgelux
It is clear that 2009 has been a year of significant change for the lighting industry with many of the major lighting brands producing financial results to send shivers down the spine of most analysts.
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Figure 1: The Xicato module based on remote phosphor technology
Figure 2: Cree’s online Product Characterization Tool
Figure 3: The Sharp Zenigata 6.7W LED array
However the economic crisis has offered significant opportunities with large numbers of smaller companies focusing specifically on LED technology. These companies have taken advantage of the technology disruption and brought highly innovative solutions to end-users. I believe many of the smaller and more innovative lighting companies will develop the skills and understanding of the new technologies faster than traditional brands and the market will see competition that makes for an exciting time for end-users and the lighting market in general. Competition means both lower prices and higher innovation.
There are several reasons why LED lighting have become more readily accepted:
• Consumers are aware of the climate change issues with significant weather events that were supposed to happen once in a 1000 years happening within decades.
• Energy prices are high and set to go much higher so return on investment is key on customer priorities.
• LED performance has significantly improved in both efficiency and colour quality making them the light source of choice.
• LED fixtures are digital and the integration of controls is straightforward compared to traditional light sources.
• Standards for LEDs are now in place.
• The cost of LED emitters have dropped significantly during 2009 making LED fixtures more affordable.
• There is a greater choice of LED manufacturers and LED component suppliers.
others LED projects:
What to expect in 2010.
Steve Landau, Philips Lumileds suggests the following:
• Power LED products are still not generic and what’s true for one product is not necessarily true for those from other manufacturers. This means that there’s significant due dilligence that must be done by the engineers to understand how each product will perform in an application before making an LED selection. The LED manufacturers must continue to provide more, better information that allows this work to be done as easily and quickly as possible. Without that effort and understanding of the differences, it’s likely that some will make the wrong choice and the impact on their business success and customer perception could be impacted.
• Understanding system reliability will take centre stage. Without truly understanding system reliability, warranty, TCO and payback, assessments cannot be accurately calculated. System reliability does not equal lumen maintenance of the LED. It is actually a calculation that considers the following elements: electrical, connections, LEDs, optical, thermal, and mechanical. Strongly related to this is the notion that LEDs don’t fail. They do, as do all electronic components. In LED solutions, the typical approach is to use an array of LEDs. Understanding the lumen maintenance and catastrophic failure probabilities will become critical. Lastly, a clear understanding of these metrics allows systems to be optimised.
• From a product perspective we expect to see significant expansion of the product offerings available to the illumination markets where light output, CRI, and CCT are more finely defined, binning continues to improve and shrink and colour uniformity and quality get significantly better.
Conclusions
2009 has been a stunning year for Solid-State Lighting that has witnessed LED technology leapfrog CFL lighting in terms of performance and LED driver technology become even more sophisticated and flexible. LEDs have again increased the performance bar with a record 249 lumens per watt efficiency in the Nichia laboratories and CREE achieving over 132 lumens per watt for production LEDs.
2010 will be a significant growth year for LED lighting manufacturers, despite the economy, and we will see a major proportion of traditional lighting companies begin to adopt LED technologies as consumers decide to move to a greener lighting solution.
Next year will see a whole raft of colour tuneable white light products launched on the market enabling users to command the lighting environment. The use of LED technology will also see the incorporation of intelligent controls within fixture designs without significant cost surplus making the energy efficient gap between traditional light sources and LED based products extend significantly.
Of course, LED emitter technology will continue to be enhanced but this is now a secondary concern as focus shifts to high CRI LED products and lower cost systems.
Geoff Archenhold is an adviser to the UK Government on LED technology and helps LED companies raise investment from the finance community. He is an investor in an LED driver company and an LED fixture company, a Lighting Energy Consultancy and euroLEDs Events LLP.
