Infocomm 2022: Being the Best Starts with the Latest in AV Technology.

Making our way through the roughly 2,000 mile journey to the Las Vegas Convention center for Infocomm 2022, we couldn’t help but wonder if this year’s show would finally resemble Pre-COVID shows or if it would be yet another vast sea of last-minute vendor and attendee cancellations that would take it to a fraction of its former glory. To our pleasant surprise, the show was back in full force! The Fearing’s team was well represented. This was Erik Muchka’s first year, Jake Smith’s second and numerous years for Ehren Tresner. It was great for all to experience a near-normal Infocomm!

As we walked into the new convention center, we were immediately awe struck by one of the largest indoor direct LED video walls in the world! The giant Samsung deployment is over 10k square feet, 165’ wide by 90’ high made up of 2,278- 4mm pixel pitch panels! At over 3 stories high, this was an incredible deployment!

Day 1 on the show floor, we saw very interesting speaker technology made by Holoplot. Their digitally steerable arrays are not only able to steer up, down, left and right, but “throw” or “beam” different audio channels in multiple directions at the same time! This makes it one of the most versatile speakers we’ve ever seen! Though not an inexpensive speaker, the applications and capabilities are priceless!

We also saw the first of many instances of gallery view capable conferencing cameras in the Huddly booth and later with Neat and along with a few others. With a great diversity of people back in the office and many still (and possibly permanently) at home, there’s a tremendous need for communicating from a conference room that provides more equitable face space in all applications.

It just doesn’t seem quite fair that people calling in get their entire face on a square in Teams meetings, but everyone in the conference room is forced to share a single square. Hence the boom of gallery view! The idea is to use AI built into cameras (soon conferencing applications) so the camera identifies each individual, and then breaks up the image to give everyone in the room their own square. Some cameras will have limits on how many views they will provide and some have other types of views or auto framing tech as well. Doing this for a conference room does mean that the squares have to fit within one larger image, but if you’re able to see everyone’s face without wasting portions of available space on unnecessary views of the table, that does help! Web conferencing software companies are working on multiple solutions that allow the gallery image to have more real estate on a call. More to come on this soon!

We also saw countless other great camera and conferencing solutions that focus on tracking and framing technology. Yealink demonstrated the ability to quickly switch between auto framing, presenter tracking and a mode that automatically zooms in on the person speaking. Other impressive tracking solutions were shown by Huddlecam, Neat, Crestron, Aver and others.

In 2 different LED video wall booths(Abesn and Planar) we witnessed incredible digital virtual backgrounds being displayed for film and other video production use. There was software that was able to sync the background with the video cameras, so when changing camera positions or angles, the background would also adapt to make it look as realistic as possible! This is ground- breaking technology since producers won’t have to rely on green screens which can create issues with lighting and shadows and require very imaginative actors! Instead, lighting has little effect and the background can add to the feel of the performance. We were told the technology we saw in the Planar booth was actually used by Lucasfilm to produce the hit series, The Madalorian!

Another hot topic with floor-wide Infocomm solutions is remote device management. We saw amplifiers with built in software configuration pages and deployment software in the Lea amplifier booth. We saw many other device monitoring platforms as well for web conferencing, like Lenovo’s device management and Liberty’s CX Unify platform that can provide remote management along with insight into device health, conferencing reliability, network status and much more! There was so much to see with platforms like Crestron Xio cloud, QSC’s QSYS Reflect, Xyte and more!

Appspace dazzled us with their growing platform. They’re branching out in ways that make their solutions your entire workspace management platform! Through Teams integration, digital signage, room reservations, hot-desking, company messaging platform, virtual receptionist, APIs along with tie ins for 3rd party devices like Cisco, Crestron, Mersive and Poly and a recent acquisition that will soon allow them to provide wiki-type pages, Appspace has the ability to tie all of your messaging and teams together!

Speaking of amazing digital signage, Brightsign’s booth didn’t disappoint! We saw a new player that is coming soon with (4) 4K built-in video outputs! This could be used to run a 2×2 video wall and deliver 8k video across or feed 4 different displays. For example, an entire menu board at a restaurant can be controlled by a single device!

In the end, we were grateful for the opportunity to meet tons of new people and reconnect with many we already knew. It definitely was an impressive show, but man did our feet hurt from walking so much! In fact, we barely found the strength to make our way to the strip and brave the 108 degree weather to get a glimpse of the glitz that is Vegas! To our current and future partners, we look forward to sharing all the amazing new technology from Infocomm 2022 and being able to offer you the most advanced AV solutions!