If there’s one piece of technology that may now be as ubiquitous as the electric light, it’s the touch screen. There’s probably one in your pocket right now — in fact, you might even be reading these words on an interactive lighted panel of some sort.
Smartphones, tablets, interactive kiosks, ATMs — we’re surrounded by them. It’s a control interface that Crestron has been making for decades, long before they’d saturated nearly every aspect of our waking lives. Crestron has been refining its touch screens during that entire time: As a critical part of our three pillars of focus — content, collaboration, and control — state-of-the-art touch screens have helped secure Crestron’s reputation as an industry leader.
In fact, as we mentioned on the Crestron blog when the company was marking a major anniversary, touch screens were already in production more than 35 years ago:
“When I joined the company in 1990, Crestron already had a two-way, bidirectional RF touch screen,” says Ray Coneys, vice-president of sales enablement. The product was big, it was clunky, but it worked. “In situations where you couldn't run a cable to a high-end meeting room, table, conference room, or a lectern, you could still have a touch screen, and it would be wireless,” he says. Shortly after Coneys was hired, the company began delving into adding color to those screens and refining their control systems further. “At that time, touch screen controllers were black and white. Crestron simultaneously released the first color touch screen with a video window: You could have a feed going to the touch screen and display a video preview on this color touch screen.”
Crestron’s vision extended into every product, says Coneys. “We were the first control system that had an Ethernet port,” he recalls. When that feature was added, Ethernet had yet to be accepted as standard. The same was true of HDMI® connectivity — Crestron was one of the first to understand that HDMI would become the digital replacement for analog video standards.