Orad Graphics Draw Crowds to South Hall Booth

Attendees at the NAB Show who step into Orad’s South Hall booth are in danger of never leaving. The company has enough eye-popping graphics, reach-out-and-touch-me touchscreens, and stunning 3D displays to keep any technology junkie engaged for hours, and most of them specialize in sports content. Luckily for Orad, NAB attendees seem to have discovered it: the booth has been mobbed since the show opened.

“It’s probably our busiest NAB in 17 years,” says VP of Sales and Marketing Shaun Dail. “This show has been phenomenal.”

Part of the phenomenon is, no doubt, Orad’s 3D graphics, but the company has been working with stereoscopic 3D graphics for nine years.

“There are some inherent differences between our stereo and what else is on the market,” Dail says. “All of the solutions out there are using either multiple boxes or multiple cards to give the appearance of a one-box output. Our processors synchronize and deliver a stereo output, so the content is synchronized within the box before it ever goes out.”

Orad also offers the ability to manipulate graphics in the Z plane in real time and can layer them.

“With stereo, we have up to 255 layers within a scene,” Dail explains. “You can allocate a scene to a camera, so, when I make that graphic cut, I may want my graphics in a different position so that it’s not jarring. We send a GPI trigger so your graphics are already in a softer position; you don’t get that in-your-face situation.”

The company is also showing a number of touchscreens, including Interact interactive graphics, which allows five live HD video streams to be run concurrently. Another one, Radar Touch, developed with a German company, puts out a laser plane 100 ft. wide on any surface on which it is mounted.

“The wall is a touchscreen, but I could run it off of someone’s head or the floor and use my feet to move things around,” Dail says. “One of the problems with [using] touchscreens is, you’re constantly shooting the talent’s back. With this, you can put it in free space in front of the talent, and the talent can manipulate objects without ever turning away from the camera. You can effectively take any existing monitor wall and make it true multi-touch.”

Another touchscreen product combines the MVP player-tracking system with a telestrator, enabling talent to jog a clip with their fingers on the screen.

“They have a menu of marks that they can make — lines in every color, lines with symbols — and can just draw it on there,” Dail says. “It’s tracked so it moves with the clip. You can give as much or as little control to the talent as you want. For a smart analyst, this is great because you have several different tool palettes to work from.”

Orad is also looking for customer feedback on one of its products, the Blend Channel in a Box. “We like to build it 80% of the way and then, based on customer feedback, build it out,” Dail explains. “That’s what we’re doing here.”

The Blend Channel in a Box system combines graphics and server playback into one machine, so that a single operator can control several channels from a single station, by setting rules for graphics insertion and deletion, among other things.

Says Dail, “It runs off of automation and can do any number of different things.”

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