My daily job is helping people explore, define, and build engaging experiences through the use of cutting-edge technology. Given my paradigm, my bar for excitement around a given product or solution can be pretty high, as, at the end of the day, experiences aren’t about technologies—they are about emotional reactions. All this being said, even though the technology is just the vehicle, there’s no harm in using amazing technology to help the person arrive in style.

My list of technologies this year is meant to be a list of high-performance parts that, when combined, can create experiences that transport people into your narrative, cementing the call to action and being worthy of sharing with friends and colleagues.

Nanolumens has a history of building all sizes and shapes of custom LED screens. Of course, the company makes traditional flat LED arrays as well as semi transparent cabinets, but it also manufactures concave and convex curves, screens in the shapes of 3D objects like squares and spheres, and LED wraps for columns. This year, its flexible LED added a tighter bend radius and tighter pixel pitches, making the list of applications longer and minimum viewing distances shorter.

Neoti is another smaller LED brand that made some waves this year by being the first LED manufacturer to get Pantone validation for color accuracy. If you don’t know what Pantone is, then you’re not in marketing, but if you’re a brand wanting exact representation of your logo, it’s a huge deal. Neoti does this by controlling everything in the chain with its own receiving cards, controllers, and electronics. If a module goes out and needs to be replaced, the system will even do a line by line color correction on the new LED’s to assure that the new module matches the larger wall perfectly.

Of course, if you’re going to build a large column or rotunda out of LED, you’re likely going to need a great mount partner to manufacture all of that steel. Not only does the structure have to be serviceable and account for the micro-adjustments necessary to align very fine pixel pitch screens, but it also needs to be safe and reliable—especially when a human audience at risk. Peerless-AV’s SEAMLESS program makes bespoke LED mounts for just these types of applications, and if you went by the company’s booth at InfoComm, you couldn’t miss its large, two-story, radiused rotunda LED structure.

Sometimes you want your imagery to seem to escape the confines of walls and structures and appear to flow on glass or in the air. Samsung’s new transparent microLED was very impressive and, although they were tight lipped about the specifications, the images spoke for themselves. Panasonic Connect also debuted Silky Fine Mist, a machine that produces a curtain of water vapor fit for projecting ghostly effects that seem to float in mid air. Both of these allow experiences to expand into spaces, beyond fixed walls and screens.

Custom shapes and configurations of high pixel density LED need some great processing power in the background to assure content is distributed properly. Media servers and content management system are must-haves when designing, building, and owning these systems. If you’re using projection to pixel map the architecture, you’re also going to need the ability to warp and blend the projected light to restore the aspect ratios and assure the accuracy and integrity of the images. This is the reason that I visited Pixera (AV Stumpfl), a video processing and media server company that specializes in experiential AV. Its scalable software and hardware platform allow users to mix and match best-in-class equipment to achieve amazing results. I especially liked its small-scale model of a venue with an art mosaic, where users could adjust content and aspect ratios real time to show off their processing power.

There were also a few software-based video processing and distribution companies on the floor that use P.C.-based hardware with GPUs to deliver the content from their CMS to the environment they support. Both three10 and Zenapptic were showing their platforms in the Unilumin booth to illustrate how network based alternatives are now viable alternatives to appliance based delivery methods of the past. Zenapptic even enables mobile augmented reality (AR) and enhanced conferencing capabilities through their tools as well.

My list is by no means meant to be comprehensive—there are many players in all of these categories—but, from my time on the show floor, these were all companies I found interesting and relevant to my daily life of redefining AV experiences. I will see you all at the next trade show, and I’d love your comments below or on social media.

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