Infinitely scalable video walls

Schwentinental, 09.04.2018 - Dynamic data overlay functionality, interoperability between a wide variety of playback displays and detail improvements characterize version 1.2 of "AnyTiles Express".  IAdea Germany's award-winning digital signage video wall solution is aimed primarily at supermarket chains, shopping malls and retailers that want to homogenize their most diverse displays, group them into individual video walls and generally take advantage of the manifold benefits of digital signage.

It's no secret that oversized images attract more attention. The same is true for moving images. So it's no wonder that more and more video walls are dominating shopping malls everywhere in our cities - outdoors, in store windows and in the stores themselves.

But while most large-scale display solutions are self-contained systems designed for only one specific purpose, IAdea Germany takes an open approach with its "AnyTiles Express" control software for video walls of any kind. This means that not only can infinitely large video walls be set up with the innovative tiles from AnyTiles, but also any display devices that have an HDMI connection can be formed into one or more individually designed video walls.

Björn Christiansen, Managing Director of IAdea Germany: "While conventional video wall solutions are constantly limited by the number of displays, with Anytiles there is no limit to either the number of screens or the pixel quality. From a simple 2 x 2 video wall to a video wall with thousands of displays, the video content remains pixel-perfect and scalable as desired."

Anytiles is based on the distributed graphics architecture (DGA) display architecture. Similar to the Hadoop distributed computing architecture used in many mainstream cloud computing clusters, DGA uses a large number of system-on-chip GPUs of extremely high resolution to form a large surface. When a screen is added to the video wall, a DGA module is also added. In this way, there is always capacity for the added pixels.

Anytiles also differs from competitive solutions, which are limited to video content only. The highly versatile Anytiles platform supports HTML5 as well as desktop mirroring for playing live content and also allows interactivity.

IAdea's solution can also be retrofitted with existing video wall applications. This allows a simple upgrade by system developers or integrators to greatly improve video quality and leverage the technological advantages of Anytiles.

In addition to detail improvements and enhanced interoperability, the data overlay function is one of the most important novelties of version 1.2, because it completely eliminates, for example, the blurring of TV sets or other products with the oversaturation of printed product tags, while at the same time allowing numerous other electronic and online features of digital signage to be used. Because if the promotion of such products changes, classic product tags would have to be replaced each time at great expense.

"AnyTiles-Express 1.2 enables brick-and-mortar retailers to go paperless, dynamically displaying live information anytime, anywhere via beautiful, synchronized video in the background. Our rich data integration provides an excellent tool here to compete effectively even with online stores," explains the IAdea Germany boss.

Logos are another simple example of the data overlay function. After all, what would advertising or infotainment be without a logo? However, not all available video content comes with a logo at the time of pre-installation. "AnyTiles Express 1.2" allows any video wall application user to freely add or replace a logo on the Creative. To quickly familiarize users with this new feature, the user interface has been redesigned and configuration for the overlay has been added. Transparent PNG and dynamic HTML5 formats are supported.

"The upgrade is designed to provide more freedom and scalability to system integrators, device deployers and content developers who use AnyTiles Express for their projects. In particular, also to simplify and strengthen their own ecosystem of video walls and other digital signage applications. Electronics stores, supermarket chains and TV resellers will benefit enormously from the upgrade," explains Chistiansen.

IAdea also offers an end-to-end, fully customized solution development service for system integrators, system houses, or content developers who require complete turnkey solutions or need optimal performance and scalability.