The outdoor mall Park Place in Barrie, Canada is home to a communal fireplace that encourages patrons to take a break, socialize, and keep warm. To complement the existing social space, Park Place recently added a digital signage display designed and installed by AV integrator Advanced.
“We were determined to help Park Place achieve their vision without breaking the bank. Given the close viewing environment at hand, outdoor LED display technology was out of the question. We had to figure out a way to bring a high-resolution indoor display outdoors, and we were able to do so,” explained David Weatherhead, president of Advanced. “After a significant amount of research and a degree of creativity, we designed and installed a unique 2 by 2 matrix of 55in. DynaScan LCD video wall panels with a seamless, super thin 3.5mm bezel-to-bezel, inside of a custom enclosure to protect it from the weather.”
Advanced selected a DynaScan display because of its LCD panels provide a brightness of 3,000 nits. Additionally, the LCD option creates a very seamless look, with one large image in high resolution. “This is a rare outdoor solution that is extremely high-resolution,” Weatherhead said. “It’s not often that this type of seamless picture is experienced on a display outdoors.”
Since the DynaScan LCD video wall is meant for indoor use, Advanced had to design a custom solution that would protect it from Canada’s severe outdoor elements. Advanced partnered with Batko to design a custom enclosure that was weatherproof, tamperproof, and temperature-regulating. The customized enclosure effectively manages the heat of the video wall, consistently keeping an optimal temperature inside. “The climate in Canada is completely unpredictable,” Weatherhead said. “We engineered a solution that protects an indoor display and prevents the enclosure from overheating due to the heat dissipation of the high-brightness displays.”
Advanced also customized a content distribution solution. The Park Place mall central office, where the content was to be transmitted from, was approximately 600 feet away from the display itself. “We worked with a manufacturer to design a completely customized fiber optic cable solution to run from the video processor to the display, and we were able to transmit the signal, despite the far distance,” Weatherhead explained.
Additionally, Advanced installed a video wall processor with 4K inputs instead of the traditional “daisychaining” configured with most projects of this nature. The specialized processor allows Park Place to add displays in the future, if they so choose. “We also configured the processor to work with a Crestron control system, which allows Park Place employees to control the display’s content easily and remotely from a touch panel,” Weatherhead said.