Smart projectors that enable users to interact directly with the images and videos displayed are increasingly being used in commerce and education to make meetings and lessons rich and collaborative, says electronics multinational Epson Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia Visual Instruments director Hans Dummer.
The 3LCD smart projectors can display an image with a diagonal length of up to 2.5 m, which is suitable for most meeting rooms and classrooms. The ultrashort-throw projectors are mounted against the display surface, making the display shadowless, which allows for direct interaction with the display on a surface such as a wall or a desk.
The interactions with the displays and markings made on images and presentation slides by participants are transmitted to all the other projectors and devices across various sites that are connected to a meeting. The session and all the markings are saved and can be emailed to all participants.
Lessons and lectures, meetings between offices spanning continents, legal and medical consultation meetings and design and brainstorming sessions, besides many other examples, are immediately available to all the participants on completion. This helps to make each of these meetings and lessons highly productive, he explains.
He highlights that the company’s 3LCD smart projectors have two digital pens each and allow for up to five fingers to be used to interact, such as marking the display or triggering embedded animations or videos. Participants can also use their own smart devices to make markings when connected to the session.
The smart projectors used in companies and schools are networked to enable them to broadcast to all the devices and can be managed according to workflow, security and legal requirements. The projectors can be managed remotely and the system automatically monitors the individual components of each projector for easy maintenance.
Dummer points out that security administrators can manage the devices so that meetings involving confidential or legal information are automatically saved to a secure location and then deleted from the projector.
Epson has installed its range of smart projectors at local schools, universities and businesses and expects good growth in demand, partly as a result of the ease of installation and use of the projectors. The projectors automatically adjust the display to fit the size of a surface and present a clear image, and the higher-end models can support 4k resolutions.
Large smart projectors can also be installed, such as for large halls and auditoriums, though direct interactions are limited to the digital pens, he says.
“Epson has a greater than 30% share of the projector market in the African region, and about 31% of the Middle Eastern market. “We expect that the quality of our projectors and the usability and capabilities will translate into sustained demand in the Middle East and Africa region,” he concludes.