Across from a 26.5 acre construction site in El Segundo, California, Thomas Properties Group (TPG) opened the doors to their state-of-the-art interactive leasing center for prospective tenants. At the construction site, TPG is preparing to make way for a master planned project of eight Class A buildings totaling 1.8 million square footage, as well as a hotel, conference center, two athletic fields and variety of retail and mixed use commercial spaces.
Informetrics, a full-service commercial real estate marketing company, was contracted to design a marketing campaign that would allow tenants to be fully immersed in the final development by way of high definition interactive Digital Signage (iDS) showing every aspect of the development prior to its completion.
Josh Tonasket, account executive and digital signage specialist for Informetrics, coordinated the A/V installation part of the project for TPG. “Three computers and three 42-inch touch screens were specified for the project, to be located within 15-feet of each other to eliminate latency of the USB signal and video degradation,” Tonasket explains. “But when TPG decided to use the monitors as televisions, three different satellite boxes, DVD players and receivers had to be housed in a cabinet about 150-feet away, which meant CAT-5 extenders had to be used to transmit audio and video to the monitors.”
After system integrators, Digital Installers Inc., completed the install and began testing the equipment, video appeared from the computers, but was not displaying the other extended sources. They soon realized the signal output was HDCP compliant and not compatible with the DVI-I input on the touch screen monitor. The only solution was to scale HD component analog signals to DVI, thus allowing a non-HDCP compliant monitor with DVI-I input to display HDTV in 720p or 1080i. This was accomplished through the use of the Gefen HD Mate Scaler.
“The Gefen HD Mate Scalers were absolutely perfect, offering two component inputs and one DVI-I input with support for three audio inputs in either digital Optical TOSlink or analog mini-phone stereo 3.5mm, and the DVI-D video was output at whatever resolution desired,” explained Tonasket. “We used the computers’ DVI output, the satellite box and DVD players’ component outputs in 720p to match the monitors’ native resolution.” The universal IR remote was then programmed to switch the input signals via the HD Mate Scaler’s IR remote.
“Gefen is the savior that allowed us to move forward quickly and inexpensively while meeting all our customers’ expectations for HDTV and interactive Digital Signage through a convergence of many sophisticated technologies that the average end-user can view as if it was just a television.”
The interactive digital signage (iDS) project completed, Informetrics now has enjoyed a solid success with TPG. Using the three touch screen monitors, TPG can address any questions or concerns prospective tenants may have in regards to the real estate development. Tonasket states, “The iDS engages prospective tenants through interactive elements that will assist in their understanding of the project.”
