Behold, the mighty VantagePoint: a vast interactive touchscreen wall, measuring approximately 11 by 4 feet, that HP hopes will make an impact with its commercial and enterprise customers. Make no mistake – this beast is not designed to sit in your living room.
It’s best to describe it as a display ‘wall’, because it’s not actually one giant screen, but six – a cluster of 47” HP LD4730G Micro-Bezel digital signage displays. Each one has 1366x768px resolution; and in their 3x2 configuration, they offer a combined “ultra-high resolution” of 4098x1536px. Together, the wall supports 32 simultaneous touchpoints, and is protected by 2mm-thick Gorilla Glass to prevent those with unusually heavy fingers from breaking it all too easily.
The heavy duty image and video processing for the displays is handled by a HP Z800 workstation, packing dual CPUs and an ATI FirePro graphics card, connected to each panel via Display Port. The less intensive tasks of managing image brightness/contrast and audio controls is delegated to a HP Pavilion Slimline PC.
The company aims to target corporate installations (e.g. headquarters, training offices etc.), high-end showrooms and information zones in consumer hotspots (such as shopping centres and airports). The underlying operating system driving the VantagePoint is Windows 7 Professional, so developers will be able to create proprietary software with relative ease, using the existing APIs and frameworks that already exist for the OS.
HP isn’t ready to talk about pricing publicly yet, but CNET’s Crave claims that the Vantage Point will start from $125,000 USD (£81,500 GBP / €98,000 EUR).
That might seem like a considerable chunk of cash – but it would probably be worth it to play Angry Birds on it.
Images via HP
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