Text:/ Christopher Holder
Remember when the bloke from Telecom would drop by in a ute to set up the phones and then you paid one bill every month for making calls? No, neither do I. Times have changed. Telstra isn’t a phone company, it’s an integrated telecommunications solutions provider – offering everything from the traditional phone through to digital signage and everything in between.
Telstra is strong in the big end of town, and would like to be stronger. It has identified the need to court bigger clients with a very personalised pitch and the Telstra Experience Centre helps them do that. The Experience centre is a multi-faceted showcase of new technologies (except for the ‘museum’ of old-school phones and telegraphs, which are intriguing in themselves), designed to inspire staff, customers and potential new clients with the possibilities and confidence in the telecommunications giant. New to the Experience Centre are the Experience Labs.
CLIENT FOCUS
The original vision was to have a hi-tech room that allowed Telstra’s sales teams to blow away clients (and potential clients) with stunning sights and sounds. For example, if Telstra was trying to win the account for Whammy Burgers’ chain of 100 stores, it could bring Whammy executives into an ‘Experience lab’ dominated by visuals and sounds of a Whammy outlet that places decision-makers in a world they intimately understand – and, by inference, Telstra intimately understands. From there, the display could demonstrate Telstra’s proposal with sophisticated concepts and 3D renderings of its product/services.
Mind you, for this to plan work, the display would need to be huge… and immersive… overwhelming even. The audio would obviously need to be in surround; there would need to be video conferencing, of course… Oh, and actually, there will need to be three of these labs, not just one, but the combined space would need to act as one large Experience Lab, with the three screens acting as one in those occasions.
SHOWING INITIATIVES
Corporate Initiatives won the installation and integration contract for the job. Technical Director, Chris Gauci picks up on the story: “We started evaluating our technical options back in mid-2010. The client wanted screens that filled the entire end space. They wanted something hugely impressive, uninterrupted and seamless. We looked at video walls of LCD/plasma panels (bezels just weren’t fine enough, particularly at that time); blended rear projection (seamless, but there wasn’t enough real estate behind the screens – even if we used mirrors); and, coincidentally, around that time, Christie released the MicroTile. We didn’t know anything much about MicroTile, but we were immediately attracted to its very narrow bezel.”
In all, 260 Christie MicroTiles would be required. Many reading this article would be grabbing their HP calculators and doing the sums… surely that’s a colossal investment?
“Cost was a key factor,” noted Gauci. “But if you’re working this out by the square metre, the MicroTile is competitive. What’s more the cost of ownership is good. The MicroTile has a very low power consumption.”
BACKSTAGE TOUR
Peter Wood is the Telstra in-house Technical Manager. He oversaw the building of Telstra’s new boardrooms in Melbourne and Sydney, while the Experience Centre has been his pet project for the last 12 months or so. A tour of the Experience Labs’ machine room reveals some of the complexity of the project.
Peter Wood: We have three labs, so all the back-end kit for those labs is replicated times three. In each rack we have Foxtel, an image controller, additional AMX cards, surround sound (there’s a Blu-Ray player as well as Foxtel), and the ClearOne sound system which takes care of all for the video conferencing, sound reinforcement, and also mixes in program audio – it acts as the audio hub. A Brightsign media player feeds the MicroTiles background content – when the screens are sitting idle you can have a moving background behind your presentation.
The Christie Spyder X20 (one per Lab) provides the grunt for the MicroTiles – taking care of all the picture-in-picture work. The Spyder takes the feeds from the Brightsign players and creates the background for the MicroTiles. There’s a component router for video cameras and DVD sources and a Polycom video conferencing codec.
In another rack we have an AMX Autopatch Epica DVI router which is common to all three labs. When the three labs are opened up to one large space the AMX system provides us with the ability to have sources from one room appear in all the other rooms.
Shure UR radio mics are shared between all the rooms. We’re using Powersoft power amps, a Volante video-over-IP video system for all of our signage distribution from the Videro signage players.
We have a smattering of broadcast gear from Black Magic and Aja. The systems allow us to take feeds from TV stations and streaming outlets via Telstra’s DVN (Digital Video Network), as well as allowing us to send them signal. So we’ve got video conferencing internally and via internet as well as broadcast television in and out.
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
Chris Gauci took the client along to the initial MicroTile roadshow when it hit town and everyone was suitably impressed – the green button was pressed.
“This was a totally new product, to us and to the market, so we needed some guidance from the manufacturer and the Australian representative (VR Solutions), which we got. The installation went largely without hitch. But we had to be very precise. We wanted the alignment of the MicroTiles to pixel-perfect, and that meant better than millimetre-perfect.
“The space is in an older building and the floor was going to let us down – it was uneven. We had to call the tradies in and get them to pour a new, even, slab.”
Three Experience Labs can be transformed into one large Lab with a 20m-long screen. A hydraulic ram system pushes the outer sections of Christie MicroTile to meet with the centre section. Each section weighs in at 1.5 tonnes, so ensuring the screens meet, pixel perfect, was a considerable feat of engineering. Above, you can see the bezel width within a screen, as well as the join between screens.
ALL AS IT SEAMS
Telstra’s original concept had three screens in three labs, with operable walls between. With the walls retracted, the space could operate with one large backdrop – albeit with gaps between the screens. “We thought we could do better than that,” recalled Gauci. “By putting the whole system on wheels and installing ‘tram’ tracks, we could use hydraulic arms to push the two outer displays into the middle display, resulting in one huge 260-tile screen.”
With the sections weighing in at 1.5 tonnes each, moving the screens wasn’t a trivial matter, let alone ensuring a pixel-perfect alignment when the hydraulic arms were deployed. It’s quite a feat of engineering.
The original attraction may have been the narrow bezel of MicroTile, but it’s clear that Christie’s modular baby has impressed in a number of other areas. Overall brightness and contrast are very striking, and screen certainly fulfils its brief – visitors leave the centre with their retinas carrying lasting memories, an image made possible by the tiles.
Chris Gauci and his team went out on a limb specifying a largely untried technology – albeit from a trusted and experienced manufacturer – and challenges arose along the way. The fan noise from 260 MicroTiles is not insignificant, which required some serious acoustic treatment behind the screens. But everyone involved in the job feels the effort was well worth it.
And there’s no doubting that Telstra has got more impact and vibrancy than they could possibly have dreamed of: “When I first walked into the room, the experience was amazing. The clarity, the quality, and the sharpness of the images, they are crystal clear and simply fantastic,” exclaimed Shane Budak, the Experience Centre’s Operations Manager. Indeed, the Experience Centre has become quite the secret weapon and the MicroTile video wall the coup de grâce.
MORE INFORMATION
Corporate Initiatives: (03) 8878 9000 or www.ciasia.com.au
VR Solutions (Christie): (07) 3844 9514 or www.vrs.com.au
AMX: (07) 5531 3103 or www.amxaustralia.com.au
Videro: www.videro.com
IDT (Brightsign): 1300 666 099 or www.idt.com.au
Axis Audio Visual (Volante): (03 ) 9752 2955 or www.axisav.com.au
Production Audio (ClearOne, Powersoft): (03) 9264 8000 or www.productionaudio.com.au
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