Steve Murphy, Ultimate Visual Solutions reveals the problems facing control room operators and discusses their installation at the Trafford Centre.
Today’s security control room operators have access to a plethora of data sources at their fingertips which they can choose to display on their video wall. The amount of available data is constantly increasing, providing information from more and more field devices and sources.
In addition to this, the amount of CCTV available to operators is also generally increasing and now includes mobile CCTV from a range of sources including transport personal body worn cameras, helicopters and drones.
With so much data available to control room operators, when it is required to be viewed and shared amongst co-workers, due to a specific event occurring, locating it and making it instantly available to everyone can be a time-consuming task.
Increasing the size of the video wall to allow all this added data to be constantly displayed is not the answer. At Ultimate Visual Solutions, we have developed high level integration features within our control room video wall technology. These allow connections to external security monitoring and auxiliary systems so that the decision on what critical data needs to be displayed (and where) can be taken by the external systems algorithms and commands can be sent to the video wall system to display the relevant data.
This data will typically be displayed within a specific area of the video wall. Operators still have dynamic control of the video wall to display other content they may require for the specific scenario that is unfolding. These integration features have been developed over time to suit specific control room operations and they enhance the activities of control room operators.
With our videowall technology in operation at the heart of the security control room at the Trafford Centre, a major indoor shopping centre located in Greater Manchester, we are helping to ensure that millions of annual visitors have a safe and enjoyable time at one of the UK’s most iconic retail and leisure destinations in the UK.
We installed a 7.2m wide by 2.7m high videowall which is made up of 24 55-inch XSN Extremely Narrow bezel LCD screens with full HD resolution; the displays offer 1920 × 1080 pixels, direct-LED backlight technology, a mechanical bezel width of only 3.5 mm between two displays and a brightness of 500 cd/m2.
Also included in the installation is a control room meeting space featuring a videowall made up of four 46-inch XSN screens with 3.5mm bezel. Both videowalls connect to a videowall controller configured for multiple analogue video feeds, IP video feeds, graphic PC data and web browsers.
By sending live video from their tablets directly back to the videowall, security staff that monitor the centre and liaise with visitors have the ability to instantly and accurately share incidents.
This article was published in the August 2021 edition of Security Journal UK. Pick up your FREE digital copy on the link here