DSE: Digital Signage Expo

Source: Digital Signage Expo 2008
Award Submission
Company: Harris Corporation
(www.broadcast.harris.com)
Client: The Venetian Macao 


Overview
The Venetian Macao, recently opened in August 2007, is scheduled to be the $1.8 billion anchor for seven resort hotels offering 12,500 guest rooms, 1.8 million square feet of meeting and convention space, 1.6 million square feet of retail, 550,000 square feet of casino space and a total of 25,000 seats in venues for live entertainment.

Harris Corporation (NYSE: HRS), an international communications and information technology company, is supplying all of the digital signage for The Venetian® Macao-Resort-Hotel, a fully integrated resort that is the largest building in Asia and the second largest in the world. With InfoCaster™ systems being placed throughout the resort’s casino and conference facilities, The Venetian Macao is Harris Corporation’s largest casino installation of InfoCaster Digital Signage™ solutions. 

Objectives
Phase one of the Harris digital signage project includes InfoCaster™ players, including both quad-channel and dual-channel systems; InfoCaster™ creation stations, used to design InfoCast presentations and templates for InfoCaster™ players; and a Network Manager system, which allows operators to control specific devices with targeted messaging throughout a large scale InfoCaster™ network.

Description
In the casino area, the InfoCaster™ systems retrieves progressive–jackpot-amount data from a central server, and combine this information with other messages from the resort’s sales and marketing department. In the convention facilities, the InfoCaster™ systems will retrieve conference room assignment data and other exhibitor information from the main server for display in predefined zones. 

Results
The InfoCaster Digital Signage™ solution was designed to create, synchronize, and deliver individualized messages throughout The Venetian Macao resort. 

Problems/Challenges
The challenges faced by the customer IT team and Harris’s product engineers primarily involved integrating the dual- head display functionality to interface with 3rd party vendors, such as Paltronic, EMBS and Bally requested by the Venetian Macao.

For Paltronics, this involved the Jackpot GPI , showing the winner of the mini jackpot by the NM server every night and interfacing between the two different products. Similarly, aligning the Power Winner (Bally) with the Infocaster Odometer to display an accumulating jackpot in the casino. 

Solutions
The Inscriber R&D team employed high-power workstations to design a tailor-made new InfoCaster interface to support the dual-head display functionality to meet the customer’s requirement.

Note: Single-head display system is built in small-form factor chassis. The in house programming team worked with different vendors and users from Venetian to customize the interface software after NDAs are signed.