In my ongoing effort to keep abreast of the latest innovations offered by L-Tron’s technology partners, I find myself consulting Advantech’s growing library of online webinars ever more frequently in recent months. Sure, you and I can read much faster than we can listen to an audio-visual seminar, but that’s the problem: If you’re like me, you read so much material that you to read too quickly, missing essential nuggets of information that you would not miss if experiencing the same information in a seminar session.
Advantech’s webinars blend the best aspects of well-organized, well-presented PowerPoint presentations, but deliver them in a format that allows attendees to control the pace of delivery. Need to step out for a quick break at a live seminar? Okay, but you’ll miss that much of the presentation. With Advantech’s prerecorded webinars, you need only click to pause a session whenever the need arises. Want to hear a point again in a live seminar? Sure, but you must interrupt the presenter and other attendees to make that happen. With Advantech’s webinars, quick clicks of your mouse are all it takes to repeat whatever you desire.
More importantly, you’d have to literally travel the globe to hear many of these Advantech presenters in person, and while your schedule and budget might actually allow you to do that, it’s nice to know you can experience all of these exceptional presenters without stressing your time and travel budgets.
A great example is Jonney Chang’s Changing the Face of Industrial HMI. As Director of Advantech’s Industrial Automation Group, Chang has primary responsibility for the group’s human-machine interface sector, including the business sections of operator panels, control panels, thin-client panels and industrial monitors. Bottom line: Jonney Chang knows HMI.
Among the critical points in Chang’s presentation I realized that, being constantly surrounded by HMIs –even the touch-screen smartphone in my pocket– I had forgotten that such ubiquitous interfaces often serve as our only modes of interaction with modern automation systems. They are, therefore, too critical to success to be taken for granted, and I had, been lulled into complacency with regard to this category of essential tools.
Chang also shared aspects of the move to multi-touch interaction that I had not considered. For example, in some industrial applications, safety considerations may be better served by requiring two-handed touch operation to ensure that both hands are occupied at the display, rather than leaving a free hand at risk of injury while the operator is intent on the HMI.
Speaking of missing things, I just realized that I started this article with the assumption that you would be navigating Advantech’s webinars with a keyboard and mouse rather than a touchscreen, if only because those are the interfaces I’m using to write this article. I wouldn’t have thought to correct that assumption if I hadn’t attended Jonney Chang’s online HMI webinar. Food for thought.