Visual media is a better communicator than sound, says Rick Cope, CEO of NanoLumens, an Atlanta area LED systems maker, because it’s not constrained by language. It’s not constrained by much else, either, thanks to new designs that NanoLumens and a handful of other companies are coming up with. The five-year-old privately-held corporation designs and assembles patented, ultra-lightweight, Flex — as in highly flexible — LED displays that can be configured and mounted in ways you used to think of as limited to a bed sheet, making, in the company’s words, any wall, column, ceiling or window into a video display. “What’s been holding digital signage back is the need to conform the message to the display, like with LCD panels, or to have to adjust the lighting of the space around the needs of projection systems,” Cope explains. He says that highly flexible displays will move the notion of lighting-as-message into new areas and into new applications, from retail to entertainment. “It’s going to move it into areas that aren’t just advertising driven,” he predicts, citing uses such as managing traffic flow in stores and at events. “You’re using it not to push the product but to create the environment,” he says.
—Dan Daley, from “The Biz,” PLSN, Nov. 2011
