News Archive
The Mystery Behind the White Tarps in the Atrium? Soon to be Revealed
By Keith Morelli
TAMPA (March 10, 2017) -- You'd have to be just plain blind if you haven't noticed the big white tarps covering the wood-paneled southern wall of the Muma College of Business atrium. Gone are the glass plaques that displayed the names of donors and whatever is going up in their place looks to be a big fat secret.
Well, here is the big reveal. In the very near future, the staid brown wall will come alive with color and information, from which you won't be able to turn away.
It's a video wall; 32 high-definition, flat screens measuring 55 inches that are squeezed together to look like a single, massive monitor. It takes up about two thirds of the wall.
A variety of offerings, including live close-captioned broadcasts from CNN, MSNBC and ESPN will be featured along with the stunning visuals from National Geographic Channel and other helpful displays that can be changed with a click of a mouse. There are real-time weather reports and the USF Bull Runner bus schedule. Along one side, will be a scrolling list of donors, so even though the glass panels have been removed, the names of all the generous friends of the college still will be proudly displayed.
Other possibilities: slideshows of recent events and spotlights of students, alumni and faculty and maybe even videos created by students. There will be a calendar of events and social media feeds. The high-tech wall can show images across its entire face, or break them down into thirds or even show 32 different videos on each screen, though that is unlikely.
A stock ticker will stream across the wall on top of the screens and, if that's not enough, the atrium will be stocked with new furniture, the design of which was determined by input from Muma College of Business students.
There may even be sports watch parties in the atrium and maybe even movie nights and the wall could be available for presentations in the atrium, though those details are still being worked out. So stay tuned.
The cost of the video wall is being picked up by Dick Corbett, a former professional boxer-turned developer, turned philanthropist. He currently is involved in a project to build refrigeration units along Port Tampa Bay's sprawling docks. He also was the developer who planned and built the upscale International Plaza in Tampa.
Corbett attended a focus group meeting of students last year to talk about the wall that he had agreed to fund.
"This isn't for the dean or the faculty," he told the attending students, "This is for you guys. It's your deal."
To give an idea of the immensity and unique qualities of the project, consider these numbers:
1,920 x 1080 – lines of resolution in a standard television
15,360 x 4,320 – lines of resolution in a single screen that makes up the Muma video wall
800 – nits (a measurement of the brightness of light, which brings out color in each video wall screen) Most LCD screens range from 200 to 500 nits. Old television sets typically produce 100 nits. At high noon, the sun pushes out 1.6 billion nits.
32 – screens that make up the wall
55 – inches across a single screen, from corner to diagonal corner
288 – square feet taken up on the atrium wall
360 – work hours it took to install the video wall
2,504 – miles between Portland, Oregon, where the screens are manufactured, and Tampa, where they now hang
2,660 – pounds the entire video wall weighs
66,355,200 – pixels contained in the 32 screens combined
17 – industry awards received by Planar, the manufacturer of the screens, in 2016
33 – the number of Muma College of Business video walls it would take to equal the size of one 9,600-square-foot video wall at Raymond James Stadium.