PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, June 9, 2011 — Black Box Corporation (NASDAQ:BBOX), an industry-leading provider of voice communications, data infrastructure, and technology products, today announced it will be demonstrating its new enterprise digital signage and video wall solutions plus wearable signage, facial recognition, video rendering, and 3D display technology at InfoComm 2011 in Orlando, Florida.
Visitors can see these technologies on display June 15–17 at Black Box Booths #5874 and #5878, where company product experts will explain how the technologies are ideal for any integrator and reseller looking to enhance its product portfolio.
Much of the attention will be centered on the company’s new iCOMPEL™ Enterprise Digital Signage (EDS) platform, Black Box’s entry into large-scale enterprise signage market. iCOMPEL EDS builds on the success of the award-winning iCOMPEL signage solution for small to medium organizations and supports signage applications where thousands of displays need to be readily accessed, managed, and monitored.
iCOMPEL EDS players located anywhere in the world and within any time zone can be synchronized and managed from a single Web browser point.
Easy to scale as a signage network expands in size and geographical diversity, the iCOMPEL EDS system incorporates state-of-the-art content development and management features. Its intuitive graphical interface offers easy drag-and-drop control. Users can update content from anywhere to change presentations, customize messaging, and issue alerts. It is also designed to work seamlessly with third-party content providers and advertisers.
The EDS product line includes small-form-factor iCOMPEL EDS Subscriber units (EDS-SS10) and two iCOMPEL EDS Manager platforms, available in a preconfigured rackmount appliance (EDS-MM30) and as a VMware® server application (EDS-M). InfoComm visitors are welcome to test drive the iCOMPEL EDS platform’s management interface.
Also on display will be VideoPlex9, Black Box’s new nine-screen video wall controller solution. Ideal for retail, corporate lobby, entertainment, and museum applications, the controller enables the scaling of video across nine displays of any size and resolution to create eye-catching video displays on a larger scale.
With the economically priced VideoPlex9, two input sources can be shown as a full image on each display, as well as enlarged across clusters or across all displays in the video wall. It also offers the flexibility to create individually shaped video wall designs, with screens positioned freely and independent of each other. Users can even show two video feeds overlapping within a single display, and it supports Picture in Picture (PiP).
The VideoPlex9 supports DVI, VGA, Component, S-Video, and Composite video inputs, and up to nine DVI-D displays for the output. The controller also supports real-time video feeds from cameras, and it is also HDTV compatible.
In addition, Black Box will demonstrate new products from its vendor partners, including:
• Wearable and tabletop digital signage tags. Ideal for any marketing application, these tags include an ultra-compact 2.4" personal digital media player for local content storage and very long battery life (up to 15 hours). Users can play slideshows of images and video loops created from media uploaded through a Web portal. Rechargeable via USB, the tags come with a magnetic clip and a lanyard for wearing around the neck.
• Real-time, 3D analysis software for facial recognition. The technology, which can be used with iCOMPEL EDS system, aims to revolutionize retail signage by providing integrated digital signage reporting and real-time playout of audience-specific content. It analyzes how long a visitor looks at a particular signage presentation while measuring the intensity and direction of the gaze. The software does this by calculating the angular position (horizontal and vertical) of the face relative to the camera. In addition, the system triggers specific signage content playout, so the right content is played for the right audience based on the determined gender and age.
• An automated video production rendering service, which gathers a variety of input formats, such as RSS feeds or news and product information, from a back-end database and outputs content in Full HD video on digital signage screens. This cloud-based service can be used with the iCOMPEL EDS platform and is designed to considerably reduce the cost and time of delivering dynamic digital signage content for maximum effect.
• Glasses-free 3D display screens. Without the help of any viewing aids, these autostereoscopic displays enable people to see spatial images, animation, and videos from different perspectives and distances. These bright, crisp screens can be ordered in various sizes and they use multiple views (5 to 8) of the same image scenery to create the 3D effect.
About Black Box
Black Box is the world’s largest technical services company dedicated to designing, building, and maintaining today’s complicated data and voice infrastructure systems. Black Box services 175,000 clients in 141 countries with 196 offices throughout the world. To learn more, visit the Black Box Web site at http://www.blackbox.com. Black Box® and the Double Diamond logo are registered trademarks, and iCOMPEL is a trademark, of BB Technologies, Inc. Any third-party trademarks appearing in this press release are acknowledged to be the property of their respective owners.
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