Founded in 1881, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is the world's first-established business school. Graduates of this program are often listed among the billionaires and top paid executives of the world, such as Elon Musk and Warren Buffet.
On the Wharton campus is Jon M. Huntsman Hall, a 324,000-square-foot building with classrooms, lecture halls, auditoriums, presentation rooms and other space serving students and faculty. Located on the eight floor is Robertson Hall and Colloquium Room, which offers multi-purpose space to the faculty department. In 2018, Wharton engaged system designer and integrator Video Visions to upgrade the display technologies in those rooms, replacing LCD and plasma displays with LED video wall technology from Planar.
The upgrade included the installation of a 13.8-foot-wide, 7.8-foot-high Planar TWS Series LED video wall with a 1.2mm pixel pitch (TWS1.2) in a 7x7 configuration in Robertson Hall and a 9.8-foot-wide, 5.5-foot-high Planar TWS Series LED video wall with a 1.2mm pixel pitch (TWS1.2) in a 5x5 configuration in Colloquium Room.
Planar TWS Series is a family of versatile ultra-fine pitch LED video wall displays featuring a 16:9 aspect ratio that ensures every pixel pitch is designed to exactly achieve Full HD, 4K or 8K resolutions. Engineering to fit a broad range of fine pitch installation environments, the Planar TWS Series supports the closest viewing distances and offers a power-efficient design with the Planar DriveSense architecture which helps extend the life of the product by providing highly uniform color and brightness while reducing heat emission, climate control requirements and power consumption.
Planar TWS Series LED video walls dramatically enhance the capabilities of Robertson Hall and Colloquium Room by overcoming the limitations of the previous displays, said Yanan Guo, IT director of classroom technology at the Wharton School.
"The goal of this project was to improve our ability to present content," Guo said. "The spaces are used for multiple purposes including conferences, all-hand meetings, leadership lectures, board meetings and high-profile events. As part of those uses, the business school will display a wide variety of supporting content, from PowerPoints and spreadsheets to imagery and videos. With the former installations, the bezels would often obstruct what we were trying to show. Also, both spaces have a lot of windows and ambient light, which made glare a problem. The updated video wall technology addresses these issues with a seamless display and bright, high-contrast resolution".
In Robertson Hall—a wide room with a 200-person seating capacity—the new 7x7 Planar TWS Series LED video wall significantly enhances the line-of-sight visibility by providing a much wider viewing angle, according to Guo. "We've received a lot of positive feedback about the improved picture quality and that audience members can now view the video walls from multiple angles without any problem," he said. "Content looks amazing. The video walls really enhance what we can do in those spaces and offer a great enduser and audience experience".
