@PrysmLPD San Jose (I May Go Wrong And Lose My Way)

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

Oh how we guffawed, how we chortled, and when we got back up on our chairs we knew we just had to share this with you.

Now that's what I call a Vista!

Earlier this week we saw this tweet from PrysmLPD “Day 1 in the London showroom…we’re showing a multi window Vista Spyder on an 8 x 4 curved Prysm videowall…”

The Vista Spyder is of course a Christie product and Prysm often set themselves head to head with Christie’s MicroTiles (when they are not talking about being a technology ‘platform’ for TV and beyond) – so you could argue that even MicroTiles’ competitors have to use a Spyder!

We are perhaps being a little unfair. We used six Spyders for the LSE project in London (and then front ended them with nine Scala players so we could manage the ‘digital canvas’ with the Scala CMS) so we know how useful and how powerful (Spyder) can be.

Spyders however are incredibly expensive – you are looking at USD 75 – 100K each! In a forthcoming book we explain though how much easier a Spyder makes your life if you are building a very large digital canvas (in this book’s case it’s with MicroTiles but to be honest the concept is pretty much the same with any tiled display technology).

When you are playing catch-up then you really do need to innovate and so Prysm demonstrating their own technology using their competitor’s kit is probably not one of the best ways to go about making a big impact (and especially then tweeting about it and bringing it to everyone’s attention!!).

Prysm should be talking to Hiperwall – we are BIG fans of this distributed computing approach to throwing pixels at a canvas or exploiting the freely available OpenSplash.

With only a little bit of development effort OpenSplash could be made to power tiled displays in a similar manner as Hiperwall.

It pains us that folks are so unwilling to think outside the box and innovate.


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