3 reasons why we like curves in our video walls
2 min read
Although curved video walls are a spectacular sight and can offer an amazing immersive viewing experience, there are very few curved LCD video walls installed at the moment. Reason is that traditional VESA mounts are not really suited to create a curved structure, giving the installers a lot of headaches when the customer requests this.
A big problem is the inter-screen gaps, which are typically much larger for curved than for straight video walls – and when the installers want to minimize these, they risk damaging the panels. Another challenge is bad alignment in the Z-axis (the depth). When maintenance is needed, a new problem arises: how to get the panels out of a curved video wall? In many cases, all panels need to be removed to allow access and service a particular panel, resulting in very long service times.
For all these reasons, Barco and strategic alliance partner Vogel’s decided to co-create a curved mounting solution for Barco UniSee facilitating the wall curvature whilst safeguarding all installation and maintenance benefits that Barco UniSee has to offer. With this innovative solution you can now easily create a curved LCD video wall with ultimate peace of mind. But what exactly is so special about curved video walls that we have spent a lot of time and effort on enabling it? Here are 3 reasons.
1. Add an immersive effect
When you are aiming to immerse your audience with a video wall, you will never be truly successful with a straight setup – especially if the wall is quite large. The ability to ‘suck the audience into the image’ is part of the DNA of the curved video wall. Especially in experience centers, this immersion aspect is extremely important to create a lasting impression.
2. A better view on the content
Also when immersion might not be the key objective of your video wall (like in a control room), a curved setup can still be essential to provide better ergonomic conditions. With only a few operators in the control room who need to monitor a lot of information on a big canvas, curving the video wall will only bring benefits. Ergonomically speaking, all users will get a perfect view on the content without the need to look at it from an uncomfortable angle. In addition, stretched viewing angles can make the content look distorted or unreadable, risking the operators to miss a critical detail. A curve in the wall – even the slightest one – will prevent this.
3. More display surface
Curving a video wall also means you can fit more square meters of display area in a room of a similar width. Of course the wall will come more to the front, but depending on the available real estate area, this might be a plus. Although this highly depends on the room, it might be worth considering.
What exactly is so special about the Barco-Vogel’s co-developed solution?
The design philosophy behind Barco UniSee was to look at all existing video wall products in a critical way, and completely redesign it to solve all problems. This philosophy was also applied when creating the curved video wall mounting. The existing VESA mountings were just not suited for curved installations, because of problems during setup and servicing, so a redesign was required. The new Barco UniSee Curved mounting solution, now allows 100% accurate installation, and enables servicing in a much smarter way, making the life of large video wall installers a lot easier.
