Versatile Solid-State Controllers Drive Four UCI School of Business Signage Applications
Six networked BrightSign digital players have been installed at UC Irvine (UCI) on the Paul Merage School of Business campus. The turnkey solid-state media controllers include five BrightSign HD210s with high-definition looping playlist support and a BrightSign HD1010 Interactive player. In addition to delivering school news combined with RSS feeds, the HD210s deliver inter-school news and inspiring alumni success stories while the interactive HD1010 drives a touch- screen directory of more than 200 faculty and staff offices.
Located in the heart of Orange County, UCI has dramatically increased its construction and remodeling activities as part of the Strategy for Academic Development at UCI through 2015, a master plan that outlines the vision of making UCI a first-choice university for college applicants nationwide.
With the remodeling projects, UCI’s School of Business replaced outmoded communications systems with BrightSign high-definition digital displays to provide modern, engaging signage solutions for four different communications applications.
The first area to be upgraded was the lobby outside a classroom sponsored by Experian® in the Business School’s main SB Building where a BrightSign HD210 player displays a series of JPG images of Experian alumni and their biographies. The biography series concludes with an appreciation screen thanking Experian for their sponsorship before automatically looping back to the first screen in the series.
“The HD210 PC-less controller for the digital sign in the Experian Lobby was purchased directly from BrightSign and I installed it myself,” explained Toshi Nakamura, System Administrator for UC Irvine. “Following the successful deployment of our digital display in the Experian Lobby, we added four more HD210 displays and an HD1010 interactive player in the business school’s main building, the SB building.“
One HD210 has been installed in the Business School’s Multipurpose Academic & Administrative Building (MPAA Building) to display inter-school news. Across the street, in the SB Building, three more network-enabled HD210 digital sign controllers display business school news as well as RSS feeds from Reuters and The Wall Street Journal which are provided over the network through a subscription with SignChannel. Prior to the upgrade to BrightSign units, the signage consisted of PCs mounted in the ceilings connected by long wires to older LCD displays running PowerPoint presentations.
“The last project we completed was the touch screen building directory in the newly remodeled main SB lobby, said Nakamura. “Here, we use a BrightSign HD1010 that supports both basic looping and interactive presentations. This gives us the ability to present slides thanking our latest donors. Then, if someone touches anywhere on that screen, the directory immediately appears with an alphabetical reference of the staff and faculty names and their room numbers. It makes finding the person you need really fast and easy, even for non-technical people.”
Prior to installing the touch screen directory in the SB Building, students and visitors had to search a board listing more than 200 offices to find the one they wanted. Whenever someone in the building changed offices, the letters had to be manually peeled off and moved around.
For the touch screen display, which is connected to the UCI network, Nakamura can sit at his desk and use BrightSign’s BrightAuthor software to create the display and the decision tree that brings up the information for each area of the screen that is touched. He also uses BrightSign’s simple networking feature to quickly and easily send updated content to the BrightSign unit controlling the directory. This feature is included with BrightAuthor, with no additional costs or license fees to pay.
Included free with all BrightSign controllers, BrightAuthor is a PC software application that simplifies creating, publishing and managing BrightSign presentations with intuitive templates and tools. The software also automatically creates the playlist file and bundles it with the selected content, ready to drop onto an SD card or send via the network for BrightSign playback.
Ease of integration and simplicity are inherent with BrightSign solid-state players which are also highly reliable because they have no moving parts to fail. By eliminating the need for a PC, the turnkey BrightSign players cost significantly less than PC-based systems and require a fraction of the power. They are also substantially smaller and can be mounted directly to the back of flat-panel LCD displays where they are out of sight.
“Everyone we’ve dealt with at BrightSign has been really nice and helpful, always available via email and there’s never been an unresolved issue or unanswered question,” said UCI’s Nakamura. “As we get more space, we’re going to have more digital signage displays; and anywhere we have digital signage, we’re definitely going to use BrightSign boxes.“
Availability, Pricing
BrightSign solid-state HD players and kiosk controllers are available from the BrightSign Store with prices of US$399.99 for the HD210 network-enabled looping digital sign player and US$649.99 for the HD1010 network-enabled interactive digital sign and kiosk controller. BrightAuthor 2.0 software, the central interface for BrightSign digital signage displays, is included free of charge and runs on a standard Windows PC running XP or Vista and Windows 7.
About BrightSign
BrightSign, LLC, based in Saratoga, California, develops products and software for digital signage. BrightSign solid-state digital sign controllers set new standards for both stand-alone and networked digital signage applications with their superior video quality, reliability, affordability, ease of use and interactivity. Online information about BrightSign units is available at www.brightsign.biz. For sales inquiries, please contact sales [at] brightsign.biz or call 408-852-9263 in the USA and +44-1223-911842 internationally
Client Contact:
Karen Fore
408-556-9389
pr [at] brightsign.biz
Agency Contact:
Andy Marken
408-986-0100
andy [at] markencom.com
Source: BrightSign
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