In Control Capitol Museum Services put together the central control room, and the firm created the infrastructure for the NSHOF. The company’s mandate, however, extended to the exhibits in the form of installing and integrating the motion-sensor cameras in each one. In some cases, depending on the size and configuration of the exhibit, multiple cameras were integrated. Some larger exhibits also had the cameras positioned in landscape mode to obser ve a wider field.
Capitol Museum Services fabricated custom camera mounts to keep the cameras as unobtrusive as possible, even while maintaining their ability to see visitors coming in enough time to call up their stored information. “All the cameras are networked, with individual IP addresses, and they’re connected using Cat5e cable,” Chet Kaplan, Director of AV Integration at Capitol Museum Ser vices, explained. Steve “Chappy” Chapman, Capitol Museum Ser vices’ Lead Installer for the project, said that, in some cases, the cameras
© 2019 Peerless Industries, Inc. All rights reserved. All Minor League Baseball trademarks and copyrights are used with permission. All rights reserved. Visit MiLB.com.
cameras strategically placed throughout the exhibit area see them coming; scan their location, facial features and eye movements; and deliver content—from a ser ver in the central AV room—based upon the information they entered in the lobby. That data is traveling back and forth over Extron 4K HDMI extenders at each station and Cat5e and Cat6 cabled home runs to the central AV room. According to Stephen Platenberg, Principal and Creative Director at Cortina Productions, determining camera placement was critical. The project team spent months mocking up exhibit areas. Factors such as exhibit lighting and all the possible ways a visitor might approach a display were incorporated into the mockups. Specific physical aspects of each exhibit area were carefully considered in order to place cameras in locations that would be invisible to the visitor, but that would provide the best viewing angles for facial recognition. Another unique challenge was how to assess a visitor’s interest in a display based on the data provided by the facialrecognition system. “To achieve this goal, we created an attention metric based on data sets such as the distance between the visitor and a display, the angle of the visitor’s face as they looked at the display and the time spent by the visitor looking at the display,” Platenberg explained. “The team orchestrated extensive observation and onsite testing to determine when a visitor is interested in a display and how that interest is reflected in the recognition data. Threshold values for the data sets were incorporated into the personalization system based on this testing. The result is a system that is responsive to a visitor’s interest.”
were aimed as part of the testing at the firm’s warehouse. “Ever y exhibit area is different, but they’re designed around letting people move as much as they need to inside them,” he noted. “Some of the exhibits are pretty physical; some of them use Microsoft Kinect devices to track motion. The spaces are trapezoidal to make as much space as each one needs, but still fit all of them into the facility.” In fact, Chappy added, visitors can get physical enough that the client was concerned about possible visitor injur y. So, the NSHOF requested
Let’s Get Digital! Peerless-AV® is a one stop shop for all your digital signage needs – from direct view LED video wall mounting systems, outdoor weatherproof displays, interactive kiosks, and more. Let our team of industry experts guide you on this digital journey.
TM
TM
November 2019 Sound & Communications Learn more at peerless-av.com
69