Electrosonic, a leading international audiovisual company, has installed a large overview videowall display and operator consoles in the control room of the Hindhead Tunnels in Southern England.

Related: Electrosonic Profile/  Audiovisual technology: A short history of the videowall/  Electrosonic’s Audio Visual & Interactive Systems at the Royal Armouries Museum 

The Hindhead tunnels are part of a four-mile bypass on the main A3 London-to-Portsmouth road in the south of England.  The 1.14 miles of twin-bore tunnels make the route safer and more efficient.

The Highways Agency’s brief for Electrosonic was to enable the control room to function like other traffic control rooms on the major road networks, but also to allow information about non-traffic aspects of the tunnel, eg live CCTV to be accessible at the same time.  Electrosonic’s solution is based on ergonomic operator consoles and a videowall display.

Electrosonic worked with the main contractor Balfour Beatty Engineering Services, engineering and installing the videowall plus operator consoles in line with graphic visualizations produced to allow the client to see how the equipment would fit into the space. 

From the control room operators can monitor 104 cameras and data from the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system which controls the lighting, ventilation, incident detection and other support systems.

Key features of the control room are: 

• The videowall includes six 50-inch Planar Clarity Margay II DLP projection cubes with 16:9 aspect ratio arranged in a 3x2 array to maximise the information displayed.  With a total resolution of 5760x2160 pixels, the cubes give a pixel perfect, near seamless image surface with only 18 inches in depth. 
• The display is fed from an Extron VN-Quantum image processor configured to receive 36 video inputs and four computer graphics images which can be displayed in any combination required, in any size and position.  The display is optimized with multiple pre-sets for different requirements which can be easily selected by the operators by clicking on the display control computer.
• The processor uses the standard Ethernet network to access the graphics while the video inputs come from a switching matrix which is part of the CCTV system.
• Electrosonic supplied the mounting frame for the videowall cubes together with cladding and a base unit with storage space. 
• Thanks to an electronically operated “sit-stand” consoles, operators are able to vary working height.  The SBFI Equinox consoles are also equipped with Axiom universal screen mounts.

In addition, five years’ support service is to be provided by Electrosonic through facility managers, Enterprise Mouchel.  With a fixed price contract, the support includes lamp replacement, 24/7 emergency call out with a four-hour response time and routine preventative maintenance.