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