Barco™

Qt helps Barco™ reduce product development time by 30%

Barco™, a global technology company, designs and develops visualization products for a variety of selected professional markets: medical imaging, media & entertainment, infrastructure & utilities, traffic & transportation, defense & security, education & training and corporate AV.

The Challenge
Barco’s newest range of digital projectors, which include 3D capabilities, is designed to deliver not only the highest quality digital cinema films, but also events, television series, live concerts and large screen video games.  The new line is built around the company’s unique Communicator Touch Panel, which comes as a standard projector component across all models. Designed for multi-user control, the Communicator features an easy-to-use touch screen interface.

The redesign of the Communicator application called for a development framework that would meet a number of stringent criteria. First of all, Barco determined that the new Communicator application, which initially was targeted only on the touch panel, would be ported to the desktop and run on Windows, Linux and Mac. With this strategy, it was critical to have a single API set for all targeted platforms and to get the best possible performance for each platform.

At the same time, the Communicator needed an easy-to-use interface encompassing multiple touch-panel functionalities. The touch panel interface was meant to simplify the tasks of cinema operators who need basic control of the projector from controlling the lamp and preset input switch to starting and stopping play lists on the cinema server.

The Solution
Qt’s intuitive API allowed for a strong graphical user interface and delivered one source code to deploy on multiple platforms. The Qt layout system enabled developers to get layouts just right and was more intuitive than Java. QGraphicsview is a strong graphical component that is quite unique and very powerful. Creating strong graphical user interfaces with this component is really an easy process.

 “Qt was the only product that ran cross-platform from the PC environment to the embedded environment, giving our application native performance. Without Qt, it would not have been possible to support native applications on all four targeted platforms,” said Martin.

The Benefit
In addition to the technology, Qt’s high level of support was a key differentiator. Not only did the company provide response to any question the developers had within one or two business days, they provided a clear picture of the roadmap for future functionality of its next release, Qt 4.4.

Based on that insight, Barco built new features into its own product roadmap and is looking forward to using the integrated Webkit integration and enhanced QGraphicsView components to design the next generation of projectors.
Finally, and most importantly, Barco noted the streamlined development process as a significant benefit. The company credits Qt technology and the product’s ease of use with reducing the number of developers needed for platform-specific coding and shortening product development time by 30 percent.