Page 68 - Security Today, October 2017

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design] guy and said, ‘Put as many as you can on the wall.’ When we laid it out, we went from 42-inch displays in the original plan to 46-inch displays, and filled the whole wall up,” Forbis said. “We can’t get another moni- tor on this wall.”
Forbis said he selected NEC’s displays af- ter a trial run with the technology.
“I bought two of the P463 and two com- puters and did some testing,” he said. “The software guys, and everyone else, thought they were really cool.”
On Display
Several features of the displays appealed to Forbis and his team, including the 24/7 run time, easy replacement, OPS computers and high efficiency.
“I especially liked the viewing angle and brightness,” Forbis said. “They were just nice, bright displays.”
Although WSDOT engaged an AV inte- grator, Diversifed of Seattle, for the instal- lation, Diversifed account executive Pete Monuteaux said that Forbis chose the tech- nologies he wanted on his own.
“It was a different approach than what we typically do, because usually we’re in ear- lier, working with the client and making sug- gestions,” Forbis said. “But we would have gotten the same result from using the NEC displays because they’re really a perfect fit for the application, and from an aesthetic point of view, they all blend well. There might be another brand out there that could have done the job, but I don’t think they’d look the same.”
Getting it Together
The installation took place in part of 2015 as well as spring 2016. Both Diversifed and Forbis said the installation overall went very well, with a few last-minute workarounds to accommodate.
For example, as Diversifed was installing the monitors on the walls, the team discov- ered that the sheet metal in the false wall built to hold the brackets didn’t go up as high as they thought.
“The building has a two-foot raised floor, and when they laid the steel in the false wall to mount the brackets, we thought we had a
foot or two to play with, but the sheet metal was actually measured from the concrete floor,” Forbis said. “So the top row of moni- tors needed some extra support, and we had to deal with that.”
Another quirk was due to the building’s geographical location in the Pacific Northwest. “The building came with an earthquake requirement, so we had to run the mount- ing by a structural engineer to make sure the monitors would stay on the walls in case of
an earthquake,” Forbis said.
Jackie McNeice, installation manager for
Diversifed, said that Forbis and his team ex- hibited an “exceptional” level of preparedness. “He anticipated what we needed for seamless integration, from power and stor- age, to identifying space for server rooms,” she said. “Michael and WSDOT were also flexible and understanding problem-solvers,
which made it a very easy project for us.”
The Traffic Management Center
The video wall and individual displays give traffic management center employees a way to view and manage current conditions of freeways, including accidents and mainte- nance projects, either on their individual desktop displays or on the large video wall.
“The video wall is used for collaboration and continuous monitoring of problem sec- tions where we know accidents are likely to occur,” Forbis said.
The video comes from the approximately 750 cameras in the WSDOT system and traf- fic detectors on the highways, giving a real- time picture of traffic conditions. A display console is set up for the traffic signal opera- tions group, which uses traffic data and live video from the cameras to change the timing of traffic signals when there are incidents or unexpected congestion.
There also are several control functions for road signs all over the state, such as sig- nage showing the variable toll rates; as a roadway gets more congested, the express toll lane’s price fluctuates, and employees can monitor the signage to ensure the correct prices are displayed. WSDOT has about 200 variable message signs around the state that
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