TPi_Magazine__February_2018

INTERVIEW
BARCO’S WOUTER BONTE
The Belgian manufacturer’s Strategic Marketing Director, ProAV / Events, discusses the future
of AV with TPi’s Ste Durham, and gives a glimpse into the thinking behind Barco’s quest for
immersive simplicity.
Given the incredible change your corner of the industry has experienced
over the past 5 years, what has Barco done to remain at the forefront?
What we do is make sure designers can continuously rely on Barco
technology to put their ideas into reality, as well as bring far more
simplicity into this space. We aren’t here to throw 75 new technologies over
a wall and hope that people like them; and creatives are not waiting for 75
new technologies anyway. What we want to do with Barco moving forward
is to provide simply immersive solutions.
What does “simply immersive” mean in real terms? For us, it’s a world
where any surface can become a canvas for an AV experience. It’s a world
where the lines between real and virtual experiences become irrelevant. A
world where more pixels, brightness and colours help create unforgettable
moments, in an “immersively simple” way.
But of course, “simple” means different things to different people
depending on whether you are an integrator, a supplier or an end client;
simplicity in setting it up; connecting it together; avoiding multiple
conversions and manual interventions; having fewer links in the chain;
being easy to transport - all of these things are part of being simple.
Is this being driven by new technology?
From the Barco perspective, the heart of the processing is a key part of
the value proposition to enable new immersive experiences as well as to
simplify the whole chain. This is driven by the outcome, not just by the fact
that it has creative technology inside. Just look at what happened over the
past few years with projection mapping. The same thing happened where
we’ve added LED technology to almost every situation where you have
light.
Having more light means you can show things in far more situations. But
it also gives us the opportunity to think about the ambient environment, or
situations where you want to have some other action going on. That I think
is a big move.
In Barco’s thinking, offering more brightness and processing power is
going to drive more simplicity in the way we accomplish things, as users will
have extra capacity to play around with. This gives people more freedom
when developing their projects and when choosing the best technology
to get the job done. It’s all about making it accessible, manageable, and
simpler.
What is the industry telling you?
What’s interesting is that this is not just a Barco thing. There really is a
demand for smarter technologies that handle a lot of things that might
have been done manually before. So again, simplicity is the way to go. Less
human intervention leads directly to faster set-ups, to give one example. Or
the same size team can provide more sophisticated mapping.
Let’s push this idea further, as simplicity could sound like an empty
catch phrase. What would it change for you if the projector could be placed
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