IAdea To Debut AnyTiles Infinite Video Wall Solution At ISE

January 22, 2016 by Dave Haynes

Taiwan-based device and solutions company IAdea has started marketing what it calls AnyTiles, an “infinite video wall” solution that gets away from the need for driving large, tiled displays with custom and high-end PCs and play-out devices.

IAdea has dubbed the technology as Distributed Graphics Architecture (or DGA), and will be showing it off next month at the ISE 2016 trade show in Amsterdam, with industrial computing solution partner Litemax, which is also based in Taiwan.

The IAdea pitch behind DGA is that it could be an industry standard for virtually unlimited display resolution on ever larger video wall installations. One of the challenges identified in the video wall market segment, IAdea argues in a press release, “is the inability to keep up with the need for ever higher pixel resolution as video walls expand. Ordinary computer graphics from a single computer tops out its pixel-driving limit at around 20 displays.”

The release continues:

“… DGA works by weaving together a number of independent, ordinary off-the-shelf graphics hardware into one large, coordinated display fabric. The idea is not different from the Hadoop computing architecture, which gathers multiple ordinary computers to form huge, unlimited computing clouds. Hadoop is now employed by software giants including Google, Facebook, SAP and IBM to perform affordable and scalable data crunching.

IAdea commercializes the DGA technology with its AnyTiles video wall system. Several projects around the globe are driving pixel-perfect content on very large video walls using this solution.

Previous attempts at using multiple, independent devices to render large video wall displays often resulted in proprietary systems that are limited in usability and prone to inconsistent performance. IAdea’s solution is compatible with running Microsoft Windows-based software as well as supporting HTML5-based vector graphics and animation, in addition to playing videos. This greatly enhances the applicability of the solution.

“We have been working with several industry leaders under non-disclosure terms for the past couple of years. Related technologies with commercial products will be unveiled later this year, and the video wall integrators are expected quickly embrace the new way once they see how well it works,” says John C. Wang, CEO of IAdea. “The momentum behind DGA is tremendous, as we utilize off-the-shelf parts often found inside your cellphones to jointly do amazing graphics with virtually unlimited scalability.”

IAdea will be exhibiting a Litemax DLO4603 to display at ISE – an 8Kx2K display tiled together in a 4 by 2 format. The units are designed for jobs like media broadcasting and commercial advertising at shopping malls, sports arenas, exhibition halls, casinos, hotels and resorts.

Video walls are one of those things I understand on basic level, but how they are done can vary widely and it’s hard to keep up on the tech. You can do it with big-ass boxes, with dedicated video wall processors, just with software, and so on. I can’t honestly tell you if this is amazing, interesting, or something that’s been done already, in other similar ways.

That said, I’m looking forward to seeing it soon at ISE.