Integrated solutions power immersive room

SÃO PAULO, Brazil - The recently reopened Chico Albuquerque Museum of Image and Sound of Ceará has installed a range of Christie^® integrated solutions, including projectors, media servers, and Christie Mystique^™, to create an immersive room for multimedia installations.

Located in Fortaleza, Brazil, the founding mission of the Museum of Image and Sound of Ceará (MIS-CE) is to preserve, disseminate and research the audio-visual heritage of the state of Ceará, with a special emphasis on culture, anthropology, history, and popular traditions. The museum has over 200,000 items in its collection, including photographs, cameras, film, videos, and posters.

Seal Telecom planned and implemented the project to modernize the museum, providing the infrastructure network, IT assets, and audio and video solutions.

In turn, Seal Telecom engaged ALCom Engenharia, a Christie LATAM Authorized Service Partner, to define, install and integrate the Christie solutions in the museum, which included 12 1DLP^® projectors, Christie Pandoras Box^® show control solutions, Christie Widget Designer software, and Christie Mystique, a camera-based alignment and recalibration solution for multi-projector arrays.

Immersive room features over 10 million pixels

The revamped museum now has an immersive room for multimedia installations using eight Christie DWU1075-GS projectors, operating in pairs, which are blended on the four walls of the space. In addition, two Christie D20WU-HS projectors are blended to illuminate the floor. The result is projection on the walls and floor, in parallelepiped format measuring 14.16 meters (46 feet) wide, 15.5 meters (50 feet) long, and 5.7 meters (19 feet) high, with a total resolution of 11,168,928 pixels.

The projection is managed using Pandoras Box, which ensures the content fills the space uniformly, creating the sensation of total immersion. A Pandoras Box Server runs the projection on the four walls and another server is used for the floor, as well as Christie Mystique to quickly align the projection on the walls. “Pandoras Box is a powerful system for managing and running visuals. It is proving essential for the museum,” says Adriano Luiz da Cunha, an electronic engineer from ALCom.

Adds Luiz da Cunha, “Thanks to this system, in the immersive room we can run the projection with a vast number of pixels. It allows us to compose a complete image from various content archives, without the slightest dip in performance. Apart from that, it also allows us to generate content separately for each individual screen, which makes the rendering process in content creation so much easier.”

Exterior projection engages visitors, passers-by

Two Christie D20WU-HS projectors with a Pandoras Box Server are used to project onto the facade of the museum. The surface, which measures 35.15 meters (115 feet) wide by 11.39 meters (37 feet) high, has a total resolution of 3336 x 1080 (3,602,880 pixels).

The projectors are temporarily mounted for the occasion on mobile elevated platforms that are used for special events, and then aligned. As Luiz da Cunha explained, the Christie Mystique software is crucial for the feasibility and agility in configuring the projection on the facade for events, because it saves the user from countless hours of tedious work aligning and calibrating the multi-projection system.

Luiz da Cunha also praised the Christie projectors which, he says, are the perfect fit for the project: “These laser projectors don’t require lamp changes, which would have been very difficult in the immersive room of the museum because that would call for constant realignment every time they needed to change a bulb. In addition, and despite their high brightness, they are compact and lightweight, which makes them easier to install and position among the other elements on the ceiling of the immersive room. The wide lens shift of the projectors was also crucial in this project.”

Clayton Brito, director of Christie’s Enterprise division in Latin America, concluded: “We are delighted with this project. It is the perfect demonstration of how Christie solutions can be used together to create high-impact visual experiences in museums. I would like to congratulate our partners Seal Telecom and ALCom Engenharia, and express our gratitude to the museum, for placing its trust in Christie solutions.”