Previously just for the IT space, control rooms are well-and-truly a playground for AV integrators. Sean Carroll looks at the latest technology in the space and what it means for integrators.

Automation in control rooms has been around since 1995, all the way back when Homer Simpson placed a drinking bird next to his keyboard on his work-from-home setup, hitting ‘Y’ every few seconds.

It’s quite remarkable that a 148kg Homer (from the episode King-Size Homer) was able to set up a way to remotely monitor and manage Springfield’s Nuclear Power Plant from the comfort of his own home. For what it’s worth, he only started working from home after realising he was eligible for worker’s compensation if he was legally living with a disability by weighing 315 pounds… just so he didn’t have to take part in the compulsory office-wide callisthenics program.

Homer blazed the trail for the future of control rooms (because of mandatory exercise) but even after his remote operation was very forward-thinking, the idea of a control room has changed tremendously, even over the past few years.

“The AV industry and control rooms are at an inflection point. We need to rethink what a control room is and what it should do,” InSight Systems director of technology Myke Ireland says.

“The future is about combining advanced technology, intelligent software and automation to create spaces that don’t just monitor but actively respond.”

He adds that this shift is a necessity as organisations look to reduce costs, improve efficiency and prioritise sustainability. The old model of hardware-heavy, human-driven control rooms simply won’t cut it.

At the end of 2024, Amber Technology announced a strategic partnership with Zenitel, a global manufacturer of unified critical communication, security and audio solutions. The company’s audio solutions are deployed in control rooms across the world, covering everything from PA intercoms, amplifiers, speakers, audio analytics and more.

Zenitel vice president APAC, safety and security, BU onshore, Arne Engle agrees with Myke’s sentiment: “The control rooms themselves are becoming more compact while still being expected to do more things.

“We have a unique offering at Zenitel where we are the first and only company pulling everything together from an audio perspective. Having everything under one platform makes the solution easier to operate for end users which is crucial in these emergency situations.”

Zenitel’s audio solutions are designed to work with a third-party devices, like an artificial intelligence (AI) model, a sensor or Internet of Things (IoT) device.

“If you have a building management system or PA system and the end user sees some concerning footage or gets an alert from the access control system, you don’t want to be in a situation where you can only watch, not react,” Arne says.

“It’s only with audio that you can react and try and figure out what’s going on. So, one of our major focuses at the moment is letting people know how important audio is to control rooms.”

Zenitel doesn’t offer control room packages, but it works with integrators who are installing these solutions. The company has case studies in highway tunnels across Europe and Asia where a sensor at either end of the tunnel picks up on changing elements, like gusts of wind or rain, and Zenitel’s solution can automate messages to drivers in the tunnels of the conditions at the other end.

Furthering the automation, Zenitel are building models to analyse the audio picked up in real-time and then make automated decisions from that. For example, the solutions can identify a gunshot, people falling over, people shouting and so on. From there, the authorities can be called or an announcement, like a lock down, can be made.

These add to the ultimate goal of a control room: to assess incoming data and make decisions quickly. With this high-level automation, these setups can now act faster than ever before.

“At InSight, we’ve embraced this with our Virtual Network Operations Centre (VNOC). The room monitors over 1,000 spaces and 15,000 devices 24/7,” Myke adds.

“If we relied on humans for every decision, we’d need 500 operators just to keep up. Instead, this intelligence system makes strategic decisions quickly and reliably as well as deploying solutions before a client has even caught wind that there’s an issue.”

This computing capacity is only possible with today’s bandwidth.

Black Box, a digital infrastructure solutions provider, has several products designed for control rooms.

“Over the past couple of years, we have evolved our product suite to suit control rooms and we’re very focused on the operator desk and operator of various control room solutions,” Black Box senior director John Hickey says.

“We have solutions to allow the operator to see many sources of information at one time, be that physical or virtual machines. And from here, we help control the workflow and how the information is presented or interacted with.”

Black Box’s Emerald suite of products are high-performance KVM-over-IP matrix switches that can extend HD or 4K video, USB and audio over IP for remote access to unlimited computers and virtual machines, managed by Black Box’s Boxilla solution.

“Our technology is designed to have unrivalled resilience compared to our competitors, with no single points of failure. You turn any individual component of our system off and only that part of the system is disabled, the rest of it keeps going,” John explains.

“We work around that resilience by having several redundant features like redundant network ports, power and so on. We have designed it like this because our clients, working in spaces like media and entertainment, transportation, government and defence or healthcare, need to have a system that stays operational.”

Black Box adds that a heavy focus for them is IP, whether that be KVM or AV-over-IP: “We’re a believer in the IP way of doing things because of its scalability and resilience, especially as it follows the cost curve of Ethernet,” John says.

“A 1Gb switch is very inexpensive these days. 10Gb switches are getting cheaper and 100Gb switches are coming in down in price at a very fast rate because of the volume of the market.”

Each of these solutions touts the benefits of remote operation and automation in control. Traditionally, a control room is something that you saw several MI6 agents operate in a James Bond film. But as Myke mentioned earlier, a control room of that size is a costly venture, especially with modern technology allowing much more than just button pressing.

“AR and VR are game changers in this space. The whole point of a control is to monitor something happening elsewhere, and while 2D video feeds or metric dashboards are helpful, imagine peering directly into a remote environment with VR goggles. That’s the future, it’s still emerging, but the potential is amazing,” Myke says.

At the AETM K-12 Conference during Integrate 2024, Igloo Vision head of Asia Pacific James Sheridan gave a presentation on the company’s ‘shared virtual reality’ solution which lets attendees enter an igloo-like room with 360° of projection.

James was touting the benefits in the education space but at the end of his session, he shared the capabilities of remote management with VR. One person stood in the middle of the igloo and virtually walked around a remote factory and then switched some dummy controls. It was Tony Stark-esque.

At Integrate, this shared VR with physical interaction had a two-second latency, but James expected it to progress quickly. He said this could be useful for remote access in industrial plants, potentially helping someone with what they’re doing in real time.

Myke adds: “We’re on the tipping point where virtual and augmented realities will begin to gain significant traction in control environments. It’s not just about seeing what’s happening; it’s about immersing decision-makers in the data itself.”

While a lot of control rooms deal with security and project management, it’s important to keep the cybersecurity of these rooms (or remote rooms) at a premium. Black Box holds this at a premium, especially as there have been several high-profile incidents in recent years.

“We’re working to get third-party certification around cybersecurity. We picked a particular security standard and we’re working to hit all the best practices outlined in standard,” John says.

“When using our products, we find that our clients want to be able to set access for end users, all the way down to a very fine grain. So that could be specifically setting one user’s access, like a one-time contractor, or adding people to a group with all the same access.”

As one of the main communication components in a control room, it’s essential that it remains as secure as possible.

“We recently established a cybersecurity lab for our products, both from a design point of view and from a testing point of view,” John explains.

“We run a lot of penetration tests during our development cycle and can constantly update our security as we go. This gives us a consistent place to communicate any issues with.”

He mentioned the IEC 62443 series of standards, the consensus-based automation and control systems cybersecurity standards that the industry is following. It defines requirements and processes for implementing and maintaining electronically secure industrial automation and control systems.

These standards set best practices for security and provide a way to assess the level of security performance. The approach to the cybersecurity challenge is a holistic one, bridging the gap between operations and information technology as well as between process safety and cybersecurity.

There’s plenty happening in the control room space. While the size of the rooms (and how many operators can work remotely) has changed, the core principles still exist. Myke concludes by saying that control rooms are changing but it’s for the better: “Don’t fear the change, lean into it. The tools are there and the opportunities are endless.”