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Case Study: The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has the world’s largest collection of aviation and space artifacts. These encompass all aspects of human flight. The museum is also home of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies.

This museum is involved in the sharing of research about the sun and explains to its 8 million visitors what is happening on the sun at almost any time of the day or night.

The museum has implemented a video wall from Planar Systems to depict for visitors large and dramatic images of the sun’s outermost atmosphere. These images are captured by telescopes installed on an orbiting NASA satellite. These satellites transmit the images to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which in turn, transmits them to the museum, where they are displayed on the video wall.

Previously these images have been on view at Air and Space but only on a single 50-inch screen, with image sizes averaging about 10 inches. Now they are displayed on the Clarity Matrix Video wall which is nearly 10 feet high and 15 feet wide. This means that millions of visitors can see them in the most realistic and dramatic fashion.

This video wall portrays vivid, ultra high-resolution telescopic images of activity in the sun’s outer atmosphere. This video wall shows the sun’s high energy activities over 48-hour periods and presents them with great impact. This means that the museum can engage, excite and educate its visitors all at the same time.

These displays were selected because of their high bright (800 nits) capability, which is an essential feature given that the video wall is installed in a walkway area between the museum’s main entrance and its Spaceflight Hall. This video wall ensures that the images are depicted with the most fitting brightness, colour and contrast levels in low light.

The Clarity Matrix design for the video wall lets power supplies and controllers to be located in a remote rack room about 80 feet away. This helps keep heat levels down, thereby ensuring a long life for the video wall. It also enables easy maintenance of these components in a controlled environment, so that there is no interference with the visitor’s viewing experience.

This video wall will run reliably for at least 5 years. When visitors stand in front of the video wall, they can view ultra-definition images of the sun in eight different temperatures, represented by different colours. This is a means of showing a wide variety of solar events that are occurring at any time.

The video wall maximises the viewing of these images with its 4K content handling capability, 1920×1080 resolution, 800-nit brightness, a 3500:1 contrast ratio and a 5.5 mm tiled bezel width.

So, there you have it….A video wall that maximises a mesmerizing viewing experience. Here’s to superb and lifelike images throughout the day and more…

 

 

(Content and images courtesy: www.planar.com)

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