The place
A unique site that really requires no introduction, the Louvre is the world's largest art museum and a historic monument in Paris, France.
The brief
Automate the management of some 150 audio-visual devices and computers throughout the vast expanse of the museum. A wide variety of display technologies and brands were already in place, such as Brightsign players, Christie and Panasonic projectors and Samsung displays. All needed to be managed in a unified manner. Devices are often moved, so the solution had to be quick and easy to re-configure. Scheduling of devices had to be intuitive, and made to operate on a per-room basis. The system should have plenty of headroom for future expansion, and had to be manageable by a relatively small, on-site IT team.
The project
An intuitive, web-based interface allows on-site staff and operators to control all devices being managed – using dedicated control panels, PCs or mobile devices. The custom designed user interface provides direct control and clear status indication for all rooms and device. It's all laid out in a way that corresponds to the floor-map of the Louvre (see illustrations above). The wide variety of equipment could be integrated and managed thanks to Blocks' flexible device driver architecture. Finally, the system's ability to schedule functions, with per-room granularity, as well as the ease by which such schedules can be changed or augmented for special occasions, was particularly appreciated.