Displays are the last mile for communication between human and machine. In recent years, a wave of smart digitization has taken global industries by storm, as companies in the vehicle, retail, manufacturing, and medical industries have implemented all types of equipment to meet demands in their respective fields. However, specifications of displays used in existing terminal sectors may not match backend computing equipment.
The mismatch may cause users to spend more time to obtain information. In severe cases, it may even lead to misinformation and undermine system agility, causing performance to fall below expectations. To solve this, ADLINK has recently proposed the concept of "Edge Visualization" and offered a series of solutions to help system integrators, solution architects, and developers from different sectors build optimized visualization platforms.
Antony Wu, Senior Director of the Industrial Display & Systems Business Center at ADLINK, explained, "Edge Visualization integrates two main architectures: edge computing and visualization to build a smart digital system that is effective and can meet users' demands."
He further pointed out that edge computing is a new architecture derived from the recent wave of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology. This architecture gives computing ability to edge equipment, lowering bandwidth requirements and system latency, increasing overall system performance, and therefore avoiding slow system responsiveness associated with centralized computing architectures.
While possessing sufficient computing capabilities, edge equipment must also have data visualization functions to help users accurately grasp computing results and optimize management performance.
By observing current industry developments, it is clear that edge computing and display technologies are mature. Mr. Wu stated that while the integration of displays and computing equipment looks simple, smart applications are still very fragmented and requirements for visualization and computing capabilities differ by industry. Furthermore, arbitrary combinations of these two major technologies without in-depth expertise may prove unsatisfactory for end users.
Taking the healthcare industry as an example, Mr. Wu mentioned that in the era of smart healthcare, hospitals have deployed many types of equipment with displays that present vastly different content based on different application scenarios.
For instance, payment kiosks mostly display healthcare items and prices. Self-registration kiosks are operated by users, so they contain fewer multimedia contents; however, they must provide agile and durable touch-screen operations. Medical imaging systems such as X-ray or CT scans put a high premium on image quality which is key to providing doctors with accurate information. For this reason, users of such systems may require maximized display dimensions, resolution, and color saturation.
Due to the varying display requirements of equipment, excessively high or low specifications will result in misspent equipment costs or wasted computing equipment performance, leading to poor system benefits.
However, integrating displays and edge computing equipment is no simple task. Mr. Wu pointed out that both displays and computing equipment need extremely specific expertise and without dedicated teams working in tandem to gain an in-depth understanding of terminal application scenarios, massive time and costs will be squandered in testing for displays and computing equipment to complement each other.
The strategic alliance between ADLINK and AU Optronics allows both parties to work very closely in technical aspects. ADLINK has a solid technical foundation in the fields of edge computing and AI through many years of developing industrial computers. On the other hand, AU Optronics is a world-renowned panel manufacturer that has transformed into a visualization solution provider in recent years, with an excellent grasp of the requirements in various fields for vertical applications. By complementing each other's capabilities, both companies can assist system integrators, solution architects, and developers in building the most suitable edge visualization platforms.
Mr. Wu said that ADLINK has had several successful cases in edge visualization solutions, he most representative being a recent project to design voting machines in the U.S. and logistics equipment in Germany.
The voting machine, commissioned by a U.S. client, must meet extremely high reliability and security requirements, and must enable identity verification and network connectivity, so that any incident that may occur during voting can be immediately reported to poll workers or handled by law enforcement agencies.
As for the logistics equipment in Germany, the solution was applied to refrigerated warehouses, allowing managers to instantly grasp the temperature, humidity, and pressure of refrigerated warehouses through a control panel. This facilitated the immediate handling of temperature loss or gas leak issues during storage or transport.
Mr. Wu pointed out that edge visualization solutions have a broad range of applications with initial applications in four major fields: smart transportation, smart healthcare, smart enterprise, and smart manufacturing. ADLINK hopes to combine its professional edge computing technology with AU Optronics' technical advantages in displays to help system integrators, solution architects, and developers build platforms with advanced computing performance and excellent visualization capabilities that satisfy the demands of specific users in the field of smart digitalization.