PROMOTIONAL FEATURE
SEEING IS BELIEVING WITH BARCO VISUALISATION
Barco offers state-of-the-art visualisation technology and a holistic solution uniquely tailored to suit any attraction
R
ichard Marples, strategic marketing director at Barco, believes impressive digitised experiences can transform a visitor attraction. “Attractive visualisation engages customers
via technology, creating memories that will make them come back again,” he says. Aside from the cutting-edge visuals that the company builds with its range of projection technology, video walls and LED displays, Barco provides digital signage and works extensively behind the scenes. Networked visualisation technology is also part of the company’s education and collaboration portfolio and central to its security and monitoring portfolio. We talked to Marples about Barco’s growth.
Can you give us an overview of Barco? Barco is a visualisation technology company at its heart, and over a number of years we’ve developed products in various markets. The company is split into
Richard Marples (left); Barco’s 60,000 lumens, cinema-optimised, commercial laser projector, the DP4K-60L
three main businesses: Entertainment and Corporate, Industrial and Government and Healthcare. We focus on projectors and displays, but we also offer lighting, digital signage, networking, image processing – these are all adjacent technology sectors which fi t into those markets.
When was the company founded? Barco was founded in 1934. The name BARCO stands for the Belgian American Radio Corporation. An entrepreneurial Belgian named Lucien de Puydt did a deal with an American component supplier to bring radio components into Belgium and he began making traditional wooden cabinet valve radios. It was very much a consumer product company. Once you’re making radios with valves,
it isn’t a big leap to make televisions and record players. As the technology developed and more people started making radios and televisions, Barco found a niche in the broadcast industry. From those valves and the radios came
Belgian company Barco started out by making traditional wooden-cased radios for the consumer market
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the CRT with the television, and then CRT projectors. During the 70s, the projectors had the red, green and blue guns and 500 to 700 lumen projectors. You had to have a completely dark room and they were dif- fi cult to set up and maintain – certainly not like the projectors we make today. Then there was a gradual move by Barco to become exclusively involved
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attractionsmanagement.com/digital
in professional markets – both niche and mainstream businesses – which are usually centred around some sort of visualisation application with its associated add-ons.
Who are your key customers? Barco’s largest division today is Entertainment and Corporate. The biggest market within E&C is digital cinema. There are only four suppliers worldwide who deliver a Hollywood-compliant projector and as one of those we’ve amassed just over 40 per cent of the worldwide market of about 130,000 screens. The digital cinema market continues to be one of our core activities. We’ve also developed an offering for media servers, audio systems and control systems. A cinema owner can now run the whole cinema from the lobby, and that’s revolutionised cinema.
What solutions do you offer attractions? It’s the same visualisation solution for a number of different applications. With our attractions customers there’s
always an entertainment or experience part, whether that’s a 4D ride or dark ride or the end of day show at a theme park. Another market is security and
monitoring, a key element of all visitor attractions. We have complete security monitoring technology and display walls, allowing the security team to monitor
AM 4 2014 ©Cybertrek 2014
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