Over 15,000 years ago, at a time predating all of today’s religions, Adiyogi, the first yogi, appeared in the Himalayas. The Adiyogi is a 112-foot-tall statue made of steel-and holds a Guinness record for the world’s tallest bust sculpture. Additionally, it was live streamed across the world to over a million viewers. The pixel mapping installation-called the Adiyogi Divya Darshanam-was inaugurated by the President of India on March 4, 2019, the eve of Mahashivrathri, and was witnessed by 300,000 devotees. This spring, the Isha Foundation in Coimbatore sponsored a projection mapping application that rivaled many worldwide for technical sophistication. Now, the AV market in India is the latest stage for high-level pixel mapping. For example, for the live event/installation Unseen Stars, designers used the huge ceiling of Grand Central Station in New York City for a pixel-mapping-driven tribute to women scientists in U.S. Examples of pixel mapping worldwide abound.
In today’s AV landscape, pixel mapping-using high lumen video projectors to transform any space from a domed ceiling to the entire façade of a building or skyscraper into a stunning digital palette-can make any visitor put down their smartphone and watch in awe. “I couldn’t have been happier with the way everything worked out,” Hallock added.Bringing AV's Newest Technology to AV's Biggest Market “We knew that Limelight could pull off a project of this size and scope,” said May, “and the content they created was absolutely stunning. Our WorldStage team also did an amazing job the entire process went really smoothly with no ‘oh, my gosh’ moments.”
MULTIPLE VIDEO PROJECTION FACADE SIGNAGE PLUS
WorldStage also brought in three air-conditioned mini mobile units to house 10 disguise vx 4 media servers and routing to drive the content, plus power and a small audio system.Īt WorldStage, Donovan James was the project manager, Raul Herrera and Dan Block the disguise operators and programmers, and Tom Roland the video engineer. “There’s a lot of ambient light in Las Vegas,” acknowledged Hallock, “but WorldStage built the brightest projection system ever deployed in the United States.” The WorldStage team calculated that 13 image areas, composed of four projectors each, all blended together, would be needed to map the entire side of The Club Tower. “Although brightness was initially a big concern,” May noted, “our team’s calculations on the number of projectors needed were spot on and the imagery held up amazingly well against the brightness of the Las Vegas Strip. As you can see in the drone shots, the projected content matched the brightness of the surrounding area perfectly.” It was a challenge for WorldStage to keep the projectors cool, and we had two days of unexpected high winds when it was hard to keep the covers on,” Hallock noted. “Las Vegas is a brutal environment in August. “The team worked night shifts (for obvious reasons) and placed solar blankets over the projectors during the day to protect them from the heat.” “Our project manager, Donovan James, did a site survey to determine appropriate projector positions, which proved to be the parking lot of the Tropicana where we built a custom scaffold structure to support 52 Barco UDX 4K32 laser projectors.” May explained.
“That was an interesting aspect of the project that illustrated just how massive the surface was.” Once WorldStage had the details on the projection surface, the team began to tackle a number of challenges. “The temperature of Las Vegas in August was a big concern, as was the need for a bright enough image to compete with the screens and architectural lighting on the Strip. Once the team identified the number of individual raster areas needed to create the overall image, it required us to supply a variety of long-throw PJ lens sizes to accommodate the different throw distances from the top to the bottom of the building,” said Michael May, vice president/account management at WorldStage.
The project began with Limelight making a photogram of The Club Tower from which a 3D model was created. “All the artwork was created in 3D with a perspective shift for the audience,” Hallock explained. “We treated the Tropicana like a three-dimensional surface, not a screen.”