What Are Control Room Video Walls and Video Wall Controllers?

1. What is a control room video wall?

A control room video wall is a special type of multi-screen setup where multiple LCD scree, DLP screen or direct fine pitch LED screen are combined together to form a unified large screen. Video walls, display walls, data walls, and media walls are collectively referred to as video walls. Typically, multiple display devices including LCD panels, LED panels or rear projection cubes (DLP cubes) are built together in a matrix to create a single logical screen (video wall), video image or any large electronic display of images can be displayed on this screen.

2. Why do we need a control room video wall?

Control room video walls offer several benefits and attributes, such as high-definition displays, consistent brightness, increased number of video images, mixed source resolutions and formats, flexibility to customize presentations, and centralized display/control that cannot be realized on a single display.

The reason why to use a control room video wall rather than a single screen may include the ability to customize tile layouts, larger screen area and higher pixel density size or resolution of making individual screens of unusual shape. Control room video walls can be found in control rooms, command centers, network operations centers (NOCs), traffic operation center (TOC), data centers, call centers, security and surveillance facilities, stadiums, and other large public spaces.

3. What is a video wall controller?

Simple control room video walls can be driven by multi-monitor video cards (computer graphics cards), but more complex arrangements may require dedicated video wall controllers or processors designed specifically to manage and drive larger video walls. IP Video Wall Controller is based on AV over IP technology, which has more flexible architecture and high performance with advanced features to manage the vdieo wall. It's available for small to large scale video wall screens. To create a large video wall (usually up to 144 monitors or more), a IP video wall controller is required. With a dedicated controller video wall, images can be scaled across the video wall, or multiple images can be spread across the video wall. In the case of picture-in-picture (PIP), this can also be a combination of the two.

A video wall controller takes one or more inputs (sources) and splits the content for delivery to multiple displays, and usually enables administrators to manage the configuration or content of their video wall. There are several main types of video wall controllers:hardware-based video wall matrix, video wall control over IP system, PC-based or Software-based controller etc.