Christie Hedra control room trends with Bill

Control room operators are spending the majority of their time sitting in front of a monitor, so any improvement to ergonomics or situational awareness will likely be greatly appreciated. That’s one benefit touted by Christie Digital Systems, an audio-visual (AV) solutions company that also serves utilities.

Bill Zhu, director of product management for image processing solutions at Christie Digital Systems, chatted with Mike Casey, president and founder of Tigercomm and co-host of Renewable Energy World’s This Week in Cleantech podcast, at the POWERGRID International Interview Studio at DISTRIBUTECH International 2024. The two discussed the latest trends in control room tech, how Christie sits in the control room market with its AV solutions, and what kind of security can be expected from them.

Two major trends in the AV/utility intersection are critical infrastructure security and consolidating control room operations.

“Operators are consolidating their operator desktop from multiple media monitors to one or two large monitors and a single keyboard and mouse to control,” Zhu said. “So that gives you better ergonomics, better situational awareness.”

Christie’s solution is a “full” one, Zhu said, including the display, the distribution and of processing the image, and its own support team to commission and support projects. Its Trade Agreements Act (TAA)-compliant products include projectors, panels, LED walls, and the processing hardware.

“We have our TAA-compliant processing side for signal distribution processing,” Zhu said. “Our product is embedded hardware, so it’s not a piece of software that runs out of Windows. That’s inherently more secure than a software-based solution.”

Originally published in POWERGRID International.