NEWS & UPDATES

September 18, 2007 In Archives By Advent

Tips on Technology

I learned a valu­able les­son in tech­nol­ogy on the show floor of a recent gamers’ con­fer­ence.  The les­son was not about the lat­est hard­ware or soft­ware, or cheats to the lat­est game. It was about wire man­age­ment and AV best practices.

If you plan on using sev­eral plasma dis­plays and run­ning a lot of wiring, it is a good idea to cre­ate a plan for where all of the wiring will go before you get to the show site. Chances are you will have to make changes once you arrive, but if you have a good idea of where things need to be, the adjust­ments should be easy. 

Here are a few help­ful tips:

1. If you’re not using raised floor­ing, which makes wire man­age­ment much eas­ier, make sure you buy car­pet padding. You can cut chan­nels in the padding to run wires under the car­pet, which will hide the wires better.

2. Bring extra zip ties. Use these to bulk wrap cords together. Then you can attach the wrapped cords as a unit to your frame.

3. Pur­chase extra-long cables. It’s bet­ter to have too much than too little.

4. Make sure you pur­chase plenty of exten­sion cords and power strips so you don’t have to buy them from the show.

5. If you’re using an out­side AV com­pany, make sure they leave any remotes behind so you can con­trol the hardware.

6. If you plan on installing any large plas­mas on a tower or large struc­ture, make sure you rent a lift from the show dec­o­ra­tor for the set-up and take down. Large dis­plays are almost impos­si­ble to set-up using only ladders.

There are sev­eral dis­play sys­tems that were cre­ated with fea­tures for deal­ing with tech­nol­ogy and wire man­age­ment.  If you are intrested in using a lot of tech­nol­ogy hard­ware, ask your exhibit com­pany about one of these prod­ucts.  This will make your set-up much eas­ier, and it will keep the wiring from detract­ing from the pop that the tech­nol­ogy should add to your exhibit.

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