AV = Audiovisual...or Autonomous Vehicle?
Crossover provide Smart Mobility Living Lab (SMLL) with bespoke audiovisual systems for the world’s most advanced urban testbed environments for connected and automated mobility (CAM) and connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) – or in layman’s terms: driverless vehicles.
Using 24km of private and public roads in London, across Greenwich and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, SMLL’s customers can trial a range of technologies relating to automated mobility. Being able to do so in both live and semi-controlled environments makes this a unique proposition, speeding the transition of these innovative ideas in transport into market-ready solutions.
AV for Control Rooms
Part of Crossover’s project brief was to equip SMLL’s two control room environments with the AV systems needed to monitor and analyse the automated vehicles and test environments. The two control rooms (Woolwich and QEOP) each feature a videowall and multiple operator displays where various sources can be displayed, with up to 3x3 sources per individual videowall display.
The videowalls are driven by sophisticated videowall processing equipment from manufacturer Datapath.
Input sources for control room monitors and videowall
- Around 270 individual network streamed cameras
- HTML based live data feeds (metrics and dashboards)
- HDMI inputs from local data servers outputting test data
- Programmatic sources and grouped sources based on metadata (e.g. GPS Cameras, Live Mapping)
- Local user devices connected to the system
Shared Research Programme
SMLL have partnered with a range of major players who are already shaping the future of transport. The collaborative Shared Research Programme (SRP) brings together their combined expertise and data, in order to tackle a range of questions on the future of mobility.
Bespoke Control Software
Crossover’s external partner company and certified geniuses Solo Works developed exciting bespoke software to control and operate these complex control rooms, presenting users of the systems with an intuitive interface.
Powerful back-end software allows users to route data and configure the environment to suit their needs - either selecting a predefined layout for the sources displayed on the videowall, or creating their own custom layouts.
From the user interface, field cameras can be controlled to recall presets and zoom in and out. By using vehicle GPS tracking data, the system can intelligently display the nearest cameras covering that section of the route in a dynamic way. A HTML view of the route highlights which cameras are currently on display, along with the vehicle position.
AV for Event Space and Client Areas
In addition, SMLL’s new facilities in Woolwich have a range of collaboration spaces for events, presentations and meetings, equipped with Cisco videoconferencing systems and networked video distribution powered by QSC’s Q-SYS. Wireless presentation connectivity is provided by Barco’s ClickShare system. The event space audio system features loudspeakers from Martin Audio, a range of wireless microphones by Sennheiser, and audio processing from Q-SYS.
Originally set to go live in Spring 2020, with the launch delayed until the Autumn due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this is a cutting-edge project the whole Crossover team are extremely excited and honoured to be a part of - a project that will meaningfully shape the vehicles of the future.
Contact us for more information about AV for control rooms, presentation and events spaces, meeting rooms and videoconferencing.
Read more about our recent project work here.
We’ve found that people’s confidence in the safety of autonomous vehicles is likely to increase if they’ve had first-hand experience of being driven in one
