Display Technology

LG video walls spark engagement at Texas school district

Provided

October 6, 2021

The Hays Consolidated Independent School District, located south of Austin, Texas, comprises 25 K-12 schools and is one of the fast-growing districts in the state. Like many K-12 districts around the country, Hays CISD schools are avid users of projection technology to present information in classrooms. LG Electronics recently installed a line of video walls throughout the district, according to a company press release.

The district also has adopted a software application, Mirroring360, that allows students and teachers to share content from mobile devices via computers in the classrooms. Hays CISD has also started introducing new digital technology, such as flat-screen displays for digital signage.

"We've begun deploying digital signage systems throughout the school," Dianne Borreson, CTO for Hays CISD, said in the release. "For example, cafeterias have digital displays for menus."

At Hays CISD's Johnson High School, the district installed a wall of 86-inch LG stretch monitors in the front of the school to highlight the school's mission and provide a visual canvas for communicating with students, staff and visitors.

"Johnson High School is a career and technical education showcase school. We wanted to showcase them even more, and with a multimedia design curriculum and a production studio, we had a good opportunity."

The school's original concept of a large LED Signage solution, inspired by scrolling, ticker-style displays, evolved. The district's technology solution provider, Trox, introduced decision-makers to the stretch display concept — traditional LCD screen technology in a wide format.

"We designed it with eight total screens, installed end-to-end," Paul Venincasa, the Trox executive who worked with Hays CISD on the project, said in the release. "First you have five screens, then the video wall turns a corner and there are three more. And it's designed to be a single canvass when the school wants it to be, with content spanning all eight screens. Or it can be segmented, with one or more screens devoted to a specific message or video feed."

Trox built the video wall at Johnson High School to include a Crestron control system and 4K video processing so the school could have flexibility in how it uses the wall. Through the control system's touch screen, users can select a video source and a display and place the content on the video wall.

"A single monitor is essentially four TVs in a stretch frame, so think of the wall as having 32 inputs," Venincasa said. "We wanted to provide a connection to each input so that the end user could put any source material to any input on each display and matrix it any way they preferred."

The system is also set up so content can scroll across the entire 57-foot video wall.

"It turned out to be exactly what we were thinking of when we had the idea of the videowall — splitting it up and having multiple feeds and really thinking through it as a production," Borreson said. "And we can have students actually create the content, like in the multimedia design class. I see all kinds of applications only limited by our imagination. With a video wall like this, you can really display and showcase everything that's happening in a school."