Barco launches new visualization platform for collaborative decision-making

Visualization specialist Barco is proud to announce the launch of a new visualization platform for collaborative decision-making inside control rooms and beyond. The platform consists of professional displays or video walls, powerful display controllers and smart control room management software. It offers operators and decision-makers nearly unlimited flexibility to collect sources, efficiently organize the data, distribute the information and collaborate with other decision-makers or information stakeholders.

Platform features universal software and hardware solutions for improved situational awareness within and between control rooms

"Today's control rooms are complex networked environments handling an ever increasing number of video and data sources," comments Robert Wu, Market Director Control Rooms of Barco's Traffic, Surveillance and Monitoring business unit. "In addition, companies and authorities increasingly seek to collaborate beyond the traditional boundaries of control centers and agencies. In this effort to collaborate, enhanced distributed decision-making tools are required to make even smarter and faster decisions, and in the end solve crisis situations faster or manage processes more efficiently. Barco's new visualization platform will support control room operators and decision-makers better by offering universal interfaces to ingest all types of collected information, by presenting it in the most efficient and ergonomic way, and by creating shared situational awareness among all possible stakeholders."

Barco's new network-based visualization platform includes high resolution graphics and video input modules which allow capturing practically any source type (real-time signals coming from highway sensors, vehicle GPS systems and other intelligent transportation systems, SCADA sources, digital maps or video sources) without the need for specialized cabling or routings. With the IP network as a backbone, Barco's platform also allows sources to be added anytime, wherever they are located.

An important component of the visualization platform is Barco's control room management software, which allows operators to easily share data with colleagues or supervisors and thus create shared situational awareness. Operators can create personal layouts and views and bundle them into perspectives that can be shared with other operators or supervisors for collaboration or approval. These can then be pushed on to more public group display walls locally or at remote locations. Reversely, Barco's control room management software can bring up (pull) sources that are displayed at remote display walls or workstations onto the local operator's screen. If required, the operator can again push this remote view to the local video wall or any other PC with Barco's software loaded on it.

The visualization platform can make use of Barco's full range of professional visualization solutions. Fulfilling practically any control room need, they range from wide-screen operator displays to personal walls, to large-screen video walls for collaborative use. Barco's display products have proven their value in installations all over the world in a wide range of applications.

Barco will showcase its new visualization platform at this year's ASIS 2009 exhibition (September 21 - 24, 2009 in Anaheim, CA, USA) at booth # 1083, Hall A-D. At the show, Barco will demonstrate the platform's typical benefits for surveillance centers, emergency operations centers, traffic management centers and network operations centers.