- The Auckland Museum, one of New Zealand's most popular tourist attractions, recognized the need to modernize the museum entrance's static information display with a more dynamic, multi-monitor approach. Outsourcing the project to Wallflower Advanced Digital Signage, the digital signage firm incorporated two Matrox M9188 PCI Express x16 octal-monitor graphics cards to drive sixteen 40-inch monitors in a four-by-four (4x4) video wall configuration, all from a single PC. The digital signage system showcases high-resolution images and video at a total resolution of 7680x4320, providing the museum with an expansive medium to promote featured exhibitions and galleries.
The Auckland Museum, considered one of New Zealand's finest heritage buildings and attracting over a half-million visitors annually, was interested in upgrading the museum entrance's printed poster designs with a dynamic digital technology to promote current and upcoming exhibitions and galleries. The required display solution had to be large enough to captivate audiences in the high-traffic area and the museum's staff acknowledged that it should serve as an all-purpose electronic canvas to meet their digital display needs.
The museum called upon locally-based Wallflower Advanced Digital Signage with a mandate to build a high-performance video wall solution, with cost effectiveness in mind.
The museum already determined that the new installation be prominently featured at the entrance area and there was plenty of wall area for Wallflower to recommend a large display-sized format in the form of a 4x4, 16-monitor video wall.
Wallflower has used Matrox multi-display graphics card and external multi-display adapter solutions for a variety of video wall installations, but was interested in using Matrox M9188 graphics cards for this particular video wall deployment. The M9188 PCIe x16 octal-monitor board is not only capable of supporting eight displays, but can also be combined with a second M9188 card to drive even more screens from a single PC running under Microsoft Windows 7 XDDM mode. Wallflower leveraged this multi-display technology, incorporating two M9188 boards to drive all sixteen 40-inch Samsung 400UX-3 LCD monitors at resolutions of 1920X1080 per display.
To complement the Matrox M9188 boards, Wallflower integrated their proprietary Wallflower Network content-management software. The software allows system operators to intuitively manage their in-house designed multimedia, including information playlists to be run at specific times and dates. More importantly, video sync was achieved via the Wallflower software—without any DirectX support—so high-resolution content can be displayed across all monitors at a total resolution of 7680x4320.
The 12x7 foot video wall now serves as the official welcome banner in the museum's main entrance, engaging, informing, and entertaining visitors with crisp, clear, and dynamic content. The staff has embraced the digital signage solution while noting the tremendous stopping power it has over passers-by.
