The global product showcase event for Christie’s brand new MicroTiles solution was recently held at the Touch Nightclub in New York City. Chris Fitzsimmons was there to report on the dawn of a new direction for the company, and see the product up-close for the first time.
Around 350 guests gathered in a New York night spot for a distinctly trendy feeling event by Christie’s standards. As senior manager for media & communications, Dorina Belu, admitted to me MicroTiles is aimed a totally new market, and requires a totally new brand of marketing.
Christie had enlisted the services of DailyDOOH co-founder and editor-in-chief, Adrian Cotterill, to compère the event for them, introducing a product that he had consulted on over the previous year.
Guests were addressed by Christie’s President and COO Jack Kline and CTO Bob Rushby (the co-inventor of MicroTiles), who took the audience through the various demonstrations around the room.
The main display wall was a room-wide and six-high array of MictroTiles featuring a demonstration of the interactivity functionality. This certainly kept the youngest guest in the room entertained for most of the evening (see image).
Other demonstrations included an irregular-shaped arrangement of tiles, dubbed the skyscraper, and “The Big O”, which was intended to show that displays don’t need to be square. This was particularly impressive due to the fact that the tiles were being driven at maximum resolution (720 x 540 each, yielding a pixel pitch of 0.567mm).
In the (admittedly dimly-lit) environs of the nightclub all the arrangements of MicroTiles looked stunningly colourful and bright. Whilst they are at their best (in my opinion) showing black-background content, as it disguises the gaps between tiles the best. That’s not to say they don’t look great showing anything else, but it was the black that was most impressive.
The visitors seemed universally impressed with the product. Brock McGinnis, with Westbury National, a consulting firm working extensively in large format display remarked: “..it is going to entirely revolutionise the market.”
InAVate readers in EMEA will get their first chance to experience MicroTiles at ISE 2010 in Amsterdam.