February 12, 2024

ISE is the world’s largest audio visual event – a 4 day annual celebration and showcase of literally everything in the vast audio visual world. Held in Barcelona, the show has around 1500 exhibitors and more than 70,000 attendees.

DVSI wasn’t exhibiting on its own, but working with our partners at Interactive Scape to jointly present our exciting developments with their objection recognition table technology.

 As well as generating leads, the show is also an amazing place to meet the industry and see what’s new and what trends we might be able to pick out for the future. Joining me on a walk-around the show floor were Chris Avis (from our Bangalore office) and Dawn Kersey (from our California office).

 So here’s a quick summary of the what we liked -

 1 -       Where’s the main action ?

The market is dominated and enthralled with collaboration technologies, with nearly half the show dedicated to it. The work-from-home revolution has created a wave of investment in conferencing capability – which aligns to improved cameras, audio systems, room control and networking.  Add to this the long term supply chain issues faced by the market leader (Crestron), and we have seen some exciting new players emerge. One stand-out performer in this space was QSC and their QSYS products (which we have been deploying and programming in our recent work with Juniper Networks in North America). Some super slick marketing saw queues of people lining up to experience their latest solutions.

2 -       What’s happening with displays ?

Banks and banks of LEDs dominated – centering around ever improving pixel densities, smaller tiles and more flexible curved surfaces. Nothing particularly new here, except those super high definition installations definitely looked smoother - with near invisible joins (but still not really yet challenging LCD for high resolution 4K or touch). One area of interest on LED was in transparent – where very high quality LED nets are being used to create high resolutions on one side of a piece of glass, whilst remaining almost completely transparent from the other side. The stand out player was the manufacturer of the LUMOS brand (who we deployed in the new Accenture Innovation Hub in Bangalore), with their flexible net.

3 -       What about the LCD market, any changes coming ?

Nothing really new from LCD, nothing larger than 110”. LG was focusing on its transparent OLED technologies (as we deployed in Walmart Spark Square showcase) and lots of different business use cases in retail and health care. One newer area of interest were the E-INK pioneers – showing the first fully productised range of larger sized black and white displays. E-INK is the technology used in the Kindle, and is of interest particularly in the signage and public display market due to its almost zero power consumption. Expectation is that we will see full colour E-INK displays arriving this year too… something that is set to leap frog the technology into the mainstream.

4 -       Anything for the Experience Centre market ?

In the interactive space, our joint presentation of object recognition tables with Interactive Scape was still the most flexible and versatile interactive concept. The 65” bonded display giving a particularly impressive clarity and touch performance (which we deployed in the City of Telecom’s Visitor Centre).  Displax were showcasing their latest generation of multi-tiled interactive video walls. Holographic conferencing displays were given a new twist by a company that merged four units together to create a whole anamorphic shop window; and lots of holographic fan based installations were whirring away. We liked the latest form of air touch, which is a cool concept, and IGLOO’s latest software for managing large format immersive projected spaces, which looks set to be a useful tool.

5 -      So what were the general take aways ?

It felt like an industry in robust health – there is clearly a lot of investment going into audio visual technologies across the workspace. However it is investment that is being driven by changes in the workplace rather than dramatic technology shifts. Displays continue to get incrementally bigger, better and cheaper. Suppliers generally are expanding with mission creep into other supplier’s territories, as opposed to new technology development.

After a few years of exciting technology change, ISE 2024 felt more like a maturing, settled technology event - where the focus has evolved from innovation to slick marketing and effective productization..