Big Sub 1mm LED Wall Delivers Wow And Design Tools At New SAVI Controls HW In Dallas

July 16, 2024 by Dave Haynes

The commercial AV controls and automation company SAVI Controls has kitted out its new HQ in Dallas with a massive video wall in an experience center designed to both wow visitors and enable life-sized virtual design efforts.

The big feature, visible as partners and customers walk in the building, is a 24-foot-wide by 10-foot-high LG Magnit LED wall.

From PR:

“The SAVI Experience Room is unlike anything we’ve done before, and to our knowledge is the first life-size virtual design environment in North America, as well as the first truly commercial-focused experience center of this magnitude,” says Derek Wilson, SAVI’s co-founder and CVO. “Our guests and potential customers are treated to a one-of-a-kind product showroom that demonstrates our mastery of digital AV technologies and shows how we can deliver extraordinary experiences and optimized integrations for their projects. From the fullscreen ‘x-ray view’ that displays what the DVLED rear mounting hardware looks like to the side-by-side virtual comparison of various display sizes, we are doing things here that simply can’t be done without a large fine-pitch LG DVLED display.”

What the heck is a CVO???

The SAVI Experience Center is the first thing guests encounter when they enter the headquarters building, and it is used as the grand finale of official tours. The eye-catching 0.9mm LG webOS DVLED display covers an entire wall while several vertically-oriented LG LCD displays highlight the various virtual locations the DVLED demos can display, including stadiums, offices, hospitality businesses and real SAVI projects from all over the world.

“We wanted to help our customers skip the imagining step and go straight to real life-size visualization, and the fine-pitch LG DVLED gave us that opportunity,” Wilson adds. “We live with this technology every day, and the new immersive tour gives dealers and business owners hands-on experience with real-time control, and it all happens in a virtual environment so we can customize it or add more environments over time without having to physically construct new rooms. So far, we have multiple demos, including real-world photos from local sports bars and golf entertainment venues that we turned into controllable virtual spaces.”

For many guests, it is also their first time seeing the power and capabilities of LG’s CLOi GuideBot robotic assistant, which is used to reserve and activate meeting spaces, offer receptionist services, lead tours and even provide automated demos of connected lights and AV equipment.

Tour guests also get to use the intuitive, web-based SAVI interface for themselves on a tablet or phone, so they can see how easy it is to navigate, adjust and control any space, including specific applications like the powerful SAVI Canvas that enables instant content dissemination across entire display networks.

“SAVI has shown that you don’t have to build a physical space to demonstrate physical experiences,” says Michael Kosla, an LG Business Solutions SVP. “With this high-resolution wall-sized LG DVLED display, they can simulate any kind of virtual room or environment they want and make live changes on the screen, including swapping AV components and playing live content on various virtual screens. The 0.9mm pixel pitch looks so real that it feels like you can walk into the virtual room, and many tour guests end up touching the display out of curiosity and awe. And that’s not even mentioning the full-building control demo that shows SAVI’s mastery of implementation and system design.”

Interesting note here that suggests SAVI got a sweetheart deal on the video wall, as a trade-off for having an experience center available without having to build one.

“Through our relationship with LG we are also making the space available for LG and dealers to give their customers demos, making it a win-win that helps expedite decision making and project approvals,” Wilson says. “With customizations like our CLOi GuideBot programming, we are showing and offering specialized features customers can utilize that wouldn’t be realistic if they simply purchased the individual hardware pieces without our solutions and software. In the end, lots of people leave here more excited than when they arrived, and that’s one of the best outcomes we could hope for.”

The PR says SAVI and LG may replicate this set-up in more locations assist selling for SAVI and LG reps, and custom integrators.

LG in its PR interestingly doesn’t reference it as microLED. It definitely has in the past, but its is more accurately described as a premium 0.9mm fine pitch LED. Like just about everything now being marketed as microLED, the Magnit is not – though some LED manufacturers are suggesting anything sub 1mm should now be referenced as microLED.

Nope. There are well-established technical definitions for microLED, mostly about the size of the LED light chips and how they’re manufactured, and the great majority of the product touted at trade shows as microLED does not meet the definition.  One possible anaology might be automakers calling hybrid vehicles EVs, even though they have gas engines AND batteries.

More important than the underlying LED chip technology is whether it looks good, and this Magnit certainly does.