As touchpanels become more intelligent, are they ready to become the central compute of a meeting room? Paul Milligan gathers opinion.
Touchpanels have been around for 30 years, which in technology terms is a lifetime. What is even more remarkable is that the basic functions of touchpanels have largely remained the same, despite some upgrades in appearance. Traditionally a meeting room was designed with a dedicated control processor to do all of the heavy lifting.
With advancements in chip technology, the next generation of control panels are getting smarter and smarter, so are we approaching the point where control panels are capable of becoming the compute in meeting rooms? We asked those on both sides of the equation (manufacturers and system integrators) for their views. The question is: why has this debate never raised its head in any meaningful way in the 30 years we’ve all been using touchpanels? Well, this newest generation can do things previous models couldn’t. “Our latest touchpanels introduce several capabilities that significantly elevate the user experience compared to earlier generations. They now support H.264 stream decoding, allowing you to preview live video and monitor content directly on the interface.
While control processing still fundamentally resides in the dedicated control processor, these newer panels are powerful enough to take on expanded roles when needed, and in some configurations can even operate as the control processor itself through options such as Extron’s LinkLicense,” says Rainer Stiehl, VP of marketing for Europe, Extron. Another manufacturer adding more power to its touchpanel lineup is Crestron. “The 80 Series Touch Screens boast Crestron’s fastest processor yet, and radar-based proximity sensing that ‘wakes’ the device when someone approaches, with no need to touch or tap,” says Joel Mulpeter, senior director, product marketing, Crestron.
Its touchpanels have recently shifted from using the Android OS to MDEP as Crestron looks to solidify its long-standing relationship with Microsoft, and provide more security. “As the 80 Series Touch Screens were being readied, MDEP had reached its maturity, so it made perfect sense to use it in the OS layer,” adds Mulpeter. The move to MDEP was “about aligning to a security posture of our customers,” he continues, which highlights that touchpanels are now being thought of by Crestron clients as more of an IT device (or compute platform), rather than something to switch lights on or off, and that the threat of hacking is taken more seriously.
We’ve established they’re more powerful than previous generations, but do touchpanels now have enough power to handle all the elements of the meeting room, such as processing, multi-camera switching, and integration with DSPs and peripherals? “Yes, technically they are capable of doing so," says Zach Phillips, technical director and founder of JP Showsystems. "Modern panels and all-in-one collaboration devices can run Teams or Zoom, manage
USB peripherals, and handle basic room control without a separate processor if you pick the correct hardware. But capability is not the same as good system design.”
Technically speaking they do have the power, says Diego Molinaro, head of engineering, Runtech AV. “But architecturally speaking, it’s not always wise for a few reasons. Modern control panels now run multi-core ARM processors, embedded Linux/Android, hardware GPU acceleration, web engines and containerised apps in some cases. Some high-end panels today are more powerful than the dedicated control processors we deployed ten years ago. However, processing power isn’t the main issue, the real question is system architecture and role separation. If you are running multi-camera switching logic, peripheral control, DSP integration, network orchestration, scheduling/calendar services, and UI rendering all on a touch device is very different from simply having enough CPU cycles.”
Stiehl says they “most definitely” have the power, but consideration must be taken into account when it comes to distributing the processing of key pieces of equipment. “Mission critical equipment, as one example, should be separated so it will not affect the operation of other key components of the system. It’s also important to distinguish between what UC compute can do and what is required for full room control. While the raw processing capabilities in a touchpanel or UC device may not be designed to replace a full control processor, the combination of a modern touchpanel with an expandable control backbone provides all the power needed to integrate cameras, DSPs, peripherals,
and room systems reliably and at scale.”
Ryan Holmes, digital workplace solutions architect, New Era Technology, is more guarded, citing some recent history as an example. “While it’s technically possible, it’s neither practical nor commercially viable and history has already shown us why for two reasons; We’ve already tried the ‘touchscreen as compute’ model. The Surface-based dock solutions demonstrated the limitations of using tablet-style devices as the room’s processing engine. These systems frequently overheated, throttled under sustained load, or simply didn’t have the processing headroom required for continuous audio and video workloads. Secondly, the compute requirements have only increased.
Modern meeting rooms rely on advanced audio and video processing, multi-camera switching, and the edge AI to add additional processing. These tasks require dedicated, thermally managed compute systems not lightweight panels
designed for scheduling and basic control, and alignment with COTS hardware to reduce costs.”
It’s been mentioned already a few times in this article, so let’s address the security part of this debate. Does integrating the interface and the compute into one device reduce the stability in meeting rooms? “Collapsing the interface and the compute into one device reduces resilience and potentially stability,” says Phillips. “If that panel fails, you lose the entire room. There is no separation between user interface, processing, monitoring, and recovery. And, importantly, by separating the compute from a panel it keeps people’s hands out of the backend. If there is a way to take down a room, someone eventually will.”
Molinaro is another to feel that “separation wins in this case if the panel is the compute”, going on to add: “If the panel fails, the room completely fails. You have no control and are not able to select a backup option. There’s no orchestration and possibly no routing logic. That reduces fault tolerance.”
Daniel Victory, group technical director, GVAV, is a little more positive about this scenario, given his recent experience on projects. “When we’ve done rooms where we have used a touchpanel as the processor, we haven’t hit any
sticking points with the day-today operation you’d have for a meeting room, training room, or seminar space. We would definitely have started to stretch it if we were going into a full large lecture theatre with a lot of peripherals and lots of technology.”
You have to think hard about the practicalities of running a touchpanel as the central compute, especially with regards to infrastructure he warns. “If you’re in a meeting room, or a big divisible space where the touchpanel is sat on wall, then putting all of the compute into that is only really viable if all of the control is on Ethernet, so you only still have your single drop. If you’re starting to add RS-232 and IO, then you have to bring more physical cabling to that one central point, which might be impractical at the location of a touchpanel. Whereas it might be easier to pull all of those cables back with all the other infrastructural cables to a central rack location.”
One undeniable trend that ran through the halls of ISE 2026 was how ease of use is now being prioritised over stacked feature sets on lots of new AV products. Does making a control panel the compute run against this trend? It’s a yes and no answer, says Molinaro. “The trend today is to make the room simple for the user and hide complexity in the back-end. Making the panel the compute increases back-end responsibility and makes firmware updates more critical. It may look simpler on paper [to have fewer boxes], but it often increases hidden complexity.”
Are we missing the point of a touchpanel here, is its appeal its simplicity? That particular quality has become key to GVAV says Victory, and the integrator is trying to build rooms where users don’t have to interact with the touchpanel at all. “We’ve got university customers where you walk in and their level of interaction is plugging the laptop’s USB-C cable in. As soon as it detects that, it turns the room on. If they want to use the PC as a source, they can select that
on the touchpanel and it auto launches it.”
Crestron envisions a world where the touchpanel brings together the different services that make a room work, including control, UC, and content, “but we still see that happening in devices installed behind displays, below displays, and in racks,” says Mulpeter.
“For the various iterations of the 80 Series Touch Screens, we designed them with three touchpoints in mind. The first is scheduling: Give the user availability options and easy ways to book the space right
at the outset. The second touchpoint is the UC application that’s running in the room. Can one join that meeting with a tap? The third, of course, is control. It’s about taking complex technology and bringing all of that together and ensuring that the user experience of that touchpanel matches what that room’s workflow is intended for. And to accomplish that, less is often more. You don’t need every button on a screen; it’s about putting the right buttons on
the screen for the intended workflow so that it’s easy for non-technical users to use.”
Given the evidence above, maybe there is only one question left to answer? Is the best use of a touchpanel as the user interface in a meeting room rather than as the brain of the room? The answers were pretty unanimous, like this from Crestron’s Mulpeter, “Currently yes, it is still an input device for human interaction as opposed to a compute for the room.” Know what you do and do it well is the mantra from Extron. “A touchpanel’s primary value will always be its role as the user interface, delivering a clear, intuitive, and reliable way for people to interact with room technology,” adds Stiehl. Nothing is changing just yet adds Holmes: “We’re seeing more integrated bars and streamlined compute platforms, but none of these shift the processing burden into the control panel. The panel remains a user interface, not the brain of the room”.