EPISODE 160 | Guest: Brian Galante, founder and owner of Dimension PR
Dive into the exciting innovations and trends at Integrated Systems Europe 2025. AI was a big theme, and we explore how it’s transforming the AV landscape, moving beyond theoretical applications to practical uses like automating everyday tasks, enhancing content creation, and even optimizing space utilization.
We look at advancements in DVLED technology, with its increasing flexibility and scalability for creating larger and more diverse displays. And we examine the growing emphasis on energy efficiency and product lifecycle management across a wide variety of products and industries.
- Discover how AI is being integrated into AV solutions for practical applications.
- Understand the increasing importance of sustainability and energy efficiency in the AV industry.
- Learn about the latest developments in DVLED technology and its expanding possibilities.
- Get an update on E Ink technologies as one of the industry’s biggest growth areas.
- Hear about some of the showstoppers that had attendees talking.
Subscribe to this podcast: Podbean | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube | RSS
Learn more about Integrated Systems Europe here.
Transcript
Derek DeWitt: Well, once again, ISE Europe, that’s Integrated Systems Europe, has occurred in Barcelona, Spain. And once again, we were there and we walked around and we saw some stuff, but we didn’t see nearly as much as my guest today, Brian Galante. He is the founder and owner of Dimension PR, and we’re gonna talk, and maybe compare notes, about what we saw and experienced at this year’s show. Hi, Brian. Always great to have you on the podcast.
Brian Galante: Hello, my friend. Thanks for having me back for the third year in a row, and it was great to see you in Barcelona.
Derek DeWitt: Indeed. Yeah, we had a good time.
I’d like to thank Brian for coming on and everybody out there for listening. Don’t forget, you can subscribe, you can share, and you can follow along with a transcript on the Visix website.
So ISE, it really is, it’s the largest event of its kind anywhere. Look, we’re not trying to dog on InfoComm; InfoComm’s fine. If you’re going to one, this is the one.
Brian Galante: Yeah, absolutely. And obviously there was an InfoComm in between last year and this year’s ISE, and I think InfoComm has really settled into a nice pocket. It knows what it’s supposed to do. People go there for a reason. It’s about the North American channel, you know, to a degree South America as well. And, you know, that international presence, it’s just, it’s more suited for ISE. And that’s also where the major product launches are happening. That’s where all the big stuff is coming out. It doesn’t necessarily make InfoComm secondary, it makes InfoComm more important to its purpose.
Derek DeWitt: Just so people understand if you haven’t been to both. So, last year, for example, InfoComm had 833 exhibitors and somewhere around just a little bit north of 30,000 attendees. ISE had 1400 exhibitors and over 172,000 visitors to the show. It’s a matter of scale. The darn thing’s huge. It takes up many, many buildings at the Fira Barcelona.
Brian Galante: Absolutely. And they added a new hall this year, so, it continues to grow. And you know, some people were saying it looked a little slower. No, you had another hall it just spreads out the crowd.
Derek DeWitt: I still thought, I thought it was crazy busy though.
Brian Galante: Yeah, Hall 6 was a nightmare though. It was great if you’re at a concert, but it was just this universe of haze and smoke machines and scaffolding, so….
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Brian Galante: Not my industry. And yeah, I quickly exited.
Derek DeWitt: So, one of the things that Debbie and I noticed walking around is that the term AI was everywhere. It wasn’t necessarily always that the AI was somehow incorporated into a product, though often it was in some way, shape or form (though I suspect we may be starting to get a little bit of AI-washing in what some people are presenting), but even just a lot of the content that was being displayed, you know, to pull people into the booths to talk about the products, a lot of that was quite clearly AI-generated or -augmented as well. Way more than last year, I thought.
Brian Galante: When it comes down to it, the killer app has not yet been found for AV. You could say that in broadcast as well. But in the broadcast industry, and I think, you know, AI has found its way, you know, into some very specific functions and people understand how it’s being used with things like content production.
In AV, I’m not seeing that yet. In the background, machine learning has been doing its job for a lot of these background tasks for a long time now. For example, live captioning, translation and meeting spaces, machine learning. It has a role in camera auto-tracking. And AI obviously is now finding its mix into that. So, AI is in the background, taking care of the mundane. It’s doing it with efficiency, so AV people can continue to focus on things like creativity.
When will that killer app be found, and is that even necessary for the AV industry? I guess that’s my question.
Derek DeWitt: That’s a very good question. Though, I will say it’s funny, the two things that you mentioned, specifically, I actually saw them. They had a stage in one of the halls where people were speaking different languages and there was a way you could, I don’t know if it was an app, I didn’t do it, but there was a QR code, and they had an AI simultaneous translator. And I was like, okay, that’s pretty cool.
Brian Galante: Absolutely. And that’s where you’re starting to see it now. So, the machine learning’s been taking care of the general process in the background, the automation element of it. And now AI is starting to find its way into that ecosystem through these secondary applications.
Derek DeWitt: I also saw, there was a screen in some booth, I can’t remember what the company was, it’s basically you’ve got cameras and it’s tracking in real time the people that come up. It’s making guesses. It’s got an AI in there making guesses about who you are.
So, for example, Deb and I walked up, Deb had her hair in kind of a long braid, so it comes up with a funny name like Super Sparkle Butterfly or something like that as just an identifier, and then it tracked us as we approached the screen and looked at it, and it started throwing up all these statistics, which were AI best guesses.
So, for me, because my hair went, started going gray when I was, honestly, 18, so I have gray hair, so it immediately said I was 65 or over, which really annoyed me to no end, and I think I swore at it. But when Deb was there, I think it must have clued in on the braid, which is kind of a young person, I guess, hairstyle, so it said she was 35. She’s only a year younger than me, so we were like, hey, wait a second. And then when we went back, it must have caught the color of her hair because suddenly she was now 65 and over as well. So, I was like, I see the potential here, but boy, it’s not there yet.
Brian Galante: Yeah. You know, and it’s interesting that, you know, the application where you saw it being used versus the application where I saw it being used. So, I tend to live in the meeting space area, the corporate, education, government for the most part. So that’s where I’m seeing AI find its way into the camera auto-tracking area.
Additionally, we’re seeing AI make its way into meeting spaces and classrooms in other ways, particularly on the audio side, which has always sort of been the bigger problem to solve in these spaces.
Now what I’m seeing is AI is making its way into that DSP ecosystem in a pretty clever way. There’s a company called Xilica that introduced a product that, it’s almost taking the philosophy that if you have a Sonos system at home or familiar with one, you tune the room with your phone. So, they’re applying AI technology to the DSP to tune the room, tune the acoustics, adjusting to the right settings. So, it’s taking that manual operation away. And really, isn’t that what AI’s supposed to do?
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, I think that is. Like you said, there’s a lot of automated stuff in there as well. I saw it in a lot of CMSs and control systems and a lot of things involving sensors as well.
Like there was one company that they had sort of a mockup of what their stuff does, they weren’t demoing it live. But, you know, in a space, a physical space, I don’t know, it’s a TED talk, it’s a big corporate meeting, whatever, maybe you’ve got multiple lights, you’ve got multiple microphones and so on. And the AI, using sensor technology, would track a speaker or multiple speakers on the stage and make sure that they were lit and that they were miked even if they moved around the space. And I thought again, humans could do that, but you need two or three people, you know, being paid to do that for that public event or that internal event. Whereas here, it’s just an AI. You just set it up and it does it automatically.
Brian Galante: Yeah, absolutely. And where I saw sensor technology being used in interesting ways this year was on the room booking side, the space booking side. Which, you know, if you think about it, I mean, obviously companies like Visix are innovating in that space. But you know, I’ve been thinking over the last year, where do we go from here? How do those technologies evolve? What else can a meeting sign really do? Has it done its job? But by adding these sensor technologies…take personal meeting spaces, for example, you walk in, it’s automatically booked. You know, that’s again removing any sort of, honestly any sort of responsibility potentially, to book a space in advance.
Derek DeWitt: Oh, right. So, you somehow, you have something on your lapel or something, and it knows that when it’s in a certain mode, you walked in that room, you booked it.
Brian Galante: Basically, yeah. It’s inside the space, typically it is mounted somewhere where it’s not supposed to be seen. You walk into that space, it connects over the network to the local meeting sign, and it’s booked, and you’ve really had to do nothing.
Derek DeWitt: Ah, that’s actually pretty cool. You know, I know that in Japan, for example, there are some shops, produce shops, food shops and so on, where they’re literally staff-free. There’s not a single person working there. It has sensors and cameras and little programs in the background tracking everything.
So, I grab four oranges, I put them in my basket, I decide I don’t need four, I put one back, so now I have three. It tracks me, which is a little creepy maybe, but it tracks me the whole time. And then when I get to the checkout, it already knows what’s in my basket, ’cause it’s been watching me. I don’t even have to push a button. It just goes, oh, you’re standing here, you must want to check out. I know what’s in your basket. Here’s how much it costs.
Brian Galante: All right, so you just answered the question I was gonna have: does it still require self-checkout?
But one other interesting example of sensor technology, also in the meeting space, that booking ecosystem, is another sensor can monitor environmental conditions inside a meeting room. So, you know, if there are any sort of concerning air quality issues. If there’s a temperature change of, you know, that’s significant, that can be reported to the sign, which at the same time is reported to the central network. That’s an interesting application. But just being able to walk into a room and have it booked and not have to worry about everything, I mean, it’s about making life in the workplace easier.
Derek DeWitt: Wow. I love that. You know, it’s interesting; so, we’ve talked a little bit about some of the retail applications in addition to, you know, other kinds of organizations. This year I saw a lot more general retail signage, interactive signs and whatnot. Whereas last year it was mainly quick service restaurants, it was QSRs. And there were still plenty of those around, but this year I saw a lot more for every kind of retail thing – shoes, shirts, records, playlists, so many different retail applications. ‘Cause I think retail is often a spur for this.
I keep thinking about how that, combined with what you just said, is going to start affecting corporate campuses, universities. I think we’re gonna start to see that sort of thing incorporated in there as well. It’s getting to the point where there’s gonna be a screen literally everywhere and maybe eventually it’ll just automatically do as much as it can for you.
Brian Galante: You hit on an interesting point. If you tie that to the sustainability initiatives that are going on throughout the industry still, I didn’t see quite as much of that this year as the last couple years, but you know, it’s obviously a very important topic.
On the digital signage side, we’re now seeing AI technology make a difference in the sustainability area. For example, leaving the days of manual on/off control behind. People forget to turn off their screens or they’re just too lazy to do it or whatever. And, you know, these screens, you know, they don’t need to be on all night. They need to be on during business hours. So, it’s a lot of wasted energy, a lot of wasted electricity. You’re reducing the lifecycle of the screen.
Automatic display control has been around for a while, but with the addition of AI into the mix…let’s say that you have a USB stick as your media player, and that’s a technology that’s been around for a while, but we’re seeing that evolve now with incorporation of AI capabilities into it. So, that solves your display control problem right there. You know, that is getting rid of any sort of manual operation.
And I saw a recent study where a business could save up to $400 annually per screen. So, if you look at the expanse of some of these multi-site retail networks, that’s a lot of money being returned to the business. At the same time, you’re reducing your CO2 emissions by as much as 640 pounds. You know, it goes a long way and taking care of your carbon footprint. So, I see sustainability and digital signage coming together a little more as we head into 2025 and 2026.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, it’s interesting. Last year the word sustainability or eco-hyphen-something was all over the place. This year, almost nowhere. I don’t know if you remember last year, but like a lot of booths were made out of recycled wood and they had plants. And this year I only saw a handful that did that. Instead, the language had changed to energy savings. ‘Cause that’s bottom-line stuff. The word sustainability, sad to say, but I just don’t think most CEOs care enough.
Brian Galante: Yes. If you’re taking a, you know, a 2RU box and reducing it to 1RU box, yeah, great, you can call yourself sustainable. You’re making a little bit of a difference. You know, everything counts, right? But is it really, you know, driving innovation for sustainability in ways that it’s going to make a real difference, you know? So, I see things like keeping your screens off all night long, and you have a thousand stores, and you have 20 screens in each store. That makes difference.
Derek DeWitt: That makes a big difference! And I think there was one company at least that I saw, I may have seen a couple, that had, again, AI incorporated into the backend where it was even saying it would, I, I’m assuming using sensor technology as well, like if the system somehow knew that there was nobody around, say, a particular digital sign in this meeting room or in the break room or whatever, it would actually adjust energy flows to that sign. It would dim it temporarily. And then when somebody comes in the room, ah, someone’s here and now it’ll brighten up. So, you’re saving even more money on energy because it goes into a lower power mode when nobody’s around.
Brian Galante: Absolutely. That’s a great point.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, it’s exciting stuff, I think. And I think this sort of thing is really going to become much more paramount if the kinds of screens that Deb and I saw this year start to become more and more commonplace.
We saw much bigger screens, we saw much brighter screens and not just outdoor, for indoor as well. And lots of different shapes, you know, curves and rounded ones and ones that go into the corner, you know? We also saw flexible and foldable screens. We saw finally someone has come up with some transparent screens that looked good. Some were on, sort of, glass or glass-like plastic; others were probably for outdoor, and they were mesh, but the quality was really good. They were clearly transparent. You could see behind them, things were a bit translucent, but the image was sharp.
So, I think these sorts of new technologies, if they start to get adopted and adopted more, are gonna at first have a much higher power cost, but with all this other stuff going on in the back, I think it’ll reduce the power cost and thus make these sorts of displays more enticing for organizations.
Brian Galante: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, and you know, in general the price of let’s say, you know, DVLED technology, you know, the price is still high. But it is coming down, you know, into maybe upper echelon of affordability, you know. It’s becoming more attainable. It’s a technology, you know, that is attractive for companies because there’s so much personalization that comes with it in the form of you can build these things to whatever aspect ratio, the curvature. However you want it to appear, however expansive you need it to be, DVLED technology allows that. Not to mention, you know, it’s a wonderful picture for dynamic signage content and other media.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, I mean that’s the thing. You know, we used to talk about like, ooh, video walls and now it’s like video wall, schmideo wall. Why get a bunch of things and worry about the bezels and blah blah blah, you know? Just get a big old screen or get a big old curvy screen or a round screen or a cube. Or there were a ton of these digital arches, you know, it’s like an archway that led you into the booth that was on all sides inside, outside, front and back. It was all video, it was all being used to draw attention. And I thought, this is where the video wall has moved to, is into something much bigger, much more interesting. ‘Cause I think we’ve all seen video walls now and it’s a little ho hum.
Brian Galante: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just think of the touch of class at minimum that it’s gonna add to the atmosphere. You know, you walk into a corporate lobby or retail store, you’re greeted with that versus you know, a traditional video wall that maybe was not installed awesomely?
Derek DeWitt: Right! Or it was installed right, but they didn’t do a bang-up job designing for it. And so, you’re like, hmm, that’s a, that’s a very nice idea.
Brian Galante: Exactly. And I guess the kinder way to put it is, you know, it could be a challenge to build that and DVLED technology, if you have that, it solves a lot of problems. So, the affordability plus that sustainability element that you mentioned, you know, signs point to that being a technology that we’re gonna see a lot more of in general purpose areas, so to speak.
Derek DeWitt: I finally saw someone had created, not one giant one yet because the tech isn’t there to create a truly huge E Ink screen, though they are getting bigger, they’ve got like 29, and in fact, we spoke to a couple of companies that present them or create the software for them or what have you, and they said, honestly, just tell us how big you want it to be, and we can probably get it made, up to certain sizes. But there was one company, SEEKINK, they have a bunch of, I don’t know, probably 6- or 8-inch, maybe 10-inch E Ink screens, bezeless. And they had stuck them all together and created an E Ink video wall. And that kind of knocked my socks off.
Brian Galante: Yeah, that’s cool. That is very cool. You know, Visix has been, you were a pioneer in E Ink, really, for digital signage. I mean, you’ve been using that technology for years. Your customers have certainly reaped benefits from it.
Derek DeWitt: Oh, and they’re flying off the shelves. I mean, people just can’t get enough of them. It’s all the time. Oh, ePaper, E Ink? Yes, yes, yes. Because it’s all working.
And now, I mean, the color is getting better. We saw way more color E Ink displays that were still wonky when it changes the image, even though that’s getting a little bit better, too. Last year it really looked like when it changed a color image, your first thought was, oh, I think the screen just broke. But now it’s quite clear this is a transition and yes, it’s gonna take 20 seconds. That’s obviously gonna get faster, ’cause it already got faster in one year. So, in a couple years it’ll be seamless. And the E Ink color looks phenomenal. It’s just as dynamic and just as bright as non-E Ink. So, I think eventually, it’s all gonna go E Ink.
Brian Galante: The technology I think that we’re going to be using in the industry is, it’s here and we’re gonna be using it for a while. You know, I don’t think that we’ve seen that next big thing for a while. I don’t know that we will, you know, in the foreseeable future.
I think a lot of this is gonna be driven through AI and through software and evolutions of the hardware enclosures and so forth that that frame most of these products. You know, displays will continue to improve. It’s gonna be, you know, moving the needle to keep up with our industry’s needs and demands. You know, I’ve come to the terms that I’ve seen everything cool in my life and, you know, it’s all over.
Derek DeWitt: There was one thing we saw that I don’t remember seeing at all last year, and that was sort of video projecting and video mapping onto, in-real-life objects. Kind of like a big piece of wall sculpture, kind of abstract. And then somewhere there are projectors, just like you see in, you know, light festivals and stuff. Oh, we video mapped the, you know, the church or the library or what have you, and it all matches up. This is becoming more and more commonplace in public events and festivals. But this was an indoor version of this stuff, and it was really quite striking. I mean, the thing it’s projecting onto is fixed just like with a building video mapping, but it was still very striking to see.
Brian Galante: That sounds very interesting. And yeah, projection mapping is one of those wow factor items that it crosses over into the consumer world and that, you know, people notice it. You’re walking down the street, New York City, London, during the holiday season, you see projection mapping doing its job everywhere. Indoors? Maybe that’s the next frontier. What I’d like to know is, can we get to the point where it can project hair onto the top of my head.
Derek DeWitt: That would save a heck of a lot of pain and suffering and money. That’s for darn sure, right.
Brian Galante: Now, that’s a useful technology, Derek.
Derek DeWitt: We’re talking about in-real-life Photoshop.
Brian Galante: Let’s get the R&D team moving on this.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. Well, you know, you said maybe we’ve seen it all and now we’re just gonna see variations and combinations of things that already exist. Because last year the big wow thing in the whole show was the LG kinetic screen, which really, I thought did a bang-up job. And the first thing I want to say is that it occurs to me that this video mapping technology, if it can somehow end up pairing, I suspect with AI, ’cause it can operate so quickly behind the scenes, with kinetic screens, so that the screen can also change shape, but does have a physical three dimensional element to it, that might be truly something spectacular.
Brian Galante: That is a very, very interesting point.
Derek DeWitt: That’s what I wanna see.
Brian Galante: Absolutely. So yeah, we’re onto something. All right, we’re gonna save innovation from dying.
Derek DeWitt: Speaking of LG, we were all kinda wowed by that huge kinetic screen last year; this year they had a very different kind of a thing. I know Dave Haynes and others said they preferred it to last year’s offering. I did not.
Just so people know, it’s a huge screen made above a bunch of tiny little boxes. And the main gimmick was you could take a picture of yourself, a selfie once you signed up. AI would then generate four, sort of, Andy Warhol-like variations of your image. You would choose one, and then it would show up on one of those boxes. And surprise, those boxes were boxes; they weren’t just square panels. They would rotate. So, they had screens on all four sides, and they would rotate and show a new picture. And so, some of them were rotating and showing pictures. Some of them were rotating just to kind of make you go, wow. They had little things bouncing. And so, it seemed very kinetic, even though the only physical movement part was that some of these boxes would rotate.
Brian Galante: I didn’t notice that. Last year, I noticed that wall. You know, but I guess it bears asking, was that a useful technology? Is it something that they, you know, showed because it was an impressive step forward but had no real use? I don’t know.
Derek DeWitt: Maybe conferences or something like that, or you know, I don’t know, intercollegiate football games maybe. I don’t know. I mean, that’s the interesting thing. Like you said, a lot of it is gonna be driven by the hardware. And I do think it’s interesting that many companies are coming up with the hardware without a use case. They’re just going, hey, look at this cool thing we can do. And then it, sometimes there’s a lag, it’s now taking companies a little bit of time to go, wow, that’s cool; what could we use it for?
Brian Galante: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, there’s a danger in innovation if, you know, you’re building things that just serve no real purpose or people don’t need today (I’m not suggesting that LG did that), but you know, I think more so in the past there were, you know, there was more of a standard operating procedure.
I think people are more careful about that today. Companies are more careful. They don’t have the R&D budgets of yesterday perhaps. And things are moving more in that direction of software. Things are moving onto the network.
SDI technology, if we, we go that route, you know, your cameras, your production, that’s gonna remain for a while in the SDI world. But, you know, a lot of these processing technologies, these workflow technologies, these delivery technologies, they’re all moving on to the IP network. And that’s what I am seeing, these gateway products, you know, to take your signal from the camera and put it directly on the network. Either have a parallel on-premise network, you know, that’s running with that, you know, IP network, or starting to phase out a lot of that technology.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. And I think we’re gonna see more and more of this sort of backend stuff. We’re gonna continue to see flashy stuff for the eyes, for the audience. But right now, it seemed to me, at least from this year, that a lot of the innovation is going on behind the scenes to make everything much more efficient for energy and the way that it utilizes chips and networks and things like this. So, we’re gonna see this space continue to evolve. We’re not perfected yet.
Brian Galante: That is an excellent closing remark, sir.
Derek DeWitt: Well, again, it’s a fantastic show. It happens every year, the beginning of February in Barcelona. It’s called ISE, Integrated Systems Europe. Glad I went. Glad my friend Brian Galante, founder and owner of Dimension PR also went. Glad we could share notes. And, of course, it was very nice to have dinner with you as well. ‘Cause Barcelona, it’s a great city.
Brian Galante: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. It is a great city. I don’t still don’t get the 10:00 PM dinner hour, but whatever. It was time well spent. It was a great show and thank you for having me again. I appreciate it.
Derek DeWitt: All right. And again, thank you everybody out there for listening. I remind you there is a transcript on the Visix website of the conversation Brian and I just had.