An insider’s look at how we created our immersive room at InfoComm 2024 and ISE 2024
Copy updated July 18, 2024
An immersive experience is transformative: it takes an otherwise unremarkable space and turns it into a whole new world. Add interactivity, cool content, and industry-leading tech, and it’s an experience you don’t want to miss.
And that was exactly what happened on our stand at ISE 2024 and InfoComm 2024. With our partners Augmenta and Théoriz, we created an interactive, immersive room with content projected onto the walls and floor. It allowed attendees to experience an immersive space and ask questions about the smart tech behind the experience.
Creating this on-stand room was no small feat. Let’s look at how we did it.
The inspiration
While the room was modestly sized — at about 100 square feet (9 square meters) — some pretty big ideas inspired the experience.
“We chose four pieces of content to illustrate the range of creative and interactive possibilities,” explains Marguerite Tricaud, creative director, Théoriz. “We wanted to bring different emotions with meditative and contemplative scenes like water ripples or the black and white fabric simulation, as well as dynamic and playful scenes with explosions or a vortex of fiery particles triggered by attendees in the room.”
“Each possible behavior was thought-through so that the visual effect generated from the interaction was as smooth and intuitive as possible,” says Marguerite to describe how they designed the experience around the visitor and their movements in the room.
The smart tech behind the experience
The experience came together with a combination of projection, cameras, 2D LiDAR sensors, and a tracking server. To illuminate the walls and floor with bright, detailed content, the team used six Christie 4K13-HS 1DLP® laser projectors that worked seamlessly with Augmenta’s technology.
“The room was equipped with four of our newly added 3D network cameras, which kept a good level of interaction even when the room was packed,” says David-Alexandre Chanel, founder, Augmenta. “These infrared time of flight (ToF) cameras detected movement to make the floor interactive.
“Particles glowed under their feet, light explosions were triggered at the touch of their hands, ripples followed their path... Any movement had a direct impact on the visuals generated around them and made them co-creators of the artwork they witnessed.” - Marguerite Tricaud, creative director, Théoriz
To deploy interactivity on the walls, the team from Augmenta used four complimentary new generation 2D LiDAR sensors with up to a finger detection precision so that people could use the wall as a giant touch surface. “All these sensors were connected to our tracking server that took care of the processing, calibration, and data formatting,” says David-Alexandre.
What visitors didn’t notice was the technology installed in the ceiling of the room or the tracking server in the technical booth on the stand.
The expertise
The tradeshows weren't the first time Théoriz and Augmenta worked with Christie solutions and that experience proved valuable at the show.
“We had the chance to work with Christie’s projectors on multiple occasions in the past, for large-scale projection mapping shows, for instance,” says Marguerite. “The quality of the technology we use is always a fundamental aspect of a successful project, and in an immersive space — where visitors are so close to the image — it's primordial to have equipment that brings the best out of the visuals we create.”
As a creative studio based in France, Théoriz designs and produces interactive and immersive content for multimedia installations. They bring their expertise in interactivity, performance, 3D real-time graphics, and audiovisual systems to installations like this immersive room.
Widely adopted by AV integrators globally, Augmenta’s technology works with various projector brands, including Christie. It’s a turnkey solution that seamlessly integrates hardware, sensors, and software suites. This combination allows for the efficient deployment, automation, and monitoring of large-scale immersive experiences.
With Christie, they found a partner that shares their dedication to delivering excellence: “As Augmenta is dedicated to delivering excellence and top-tier quality in tracking and interactivity, we greatly value collaborations with brands that uphold similar standards. Given Christie's commitment to excellence and its esteemed reputation for delivering the highest quality in the market, it's undoubtedly our preferred choice for partnerships,” says David-Alexandre.
With this experience and expertise, they easily managed the tremendous number of attendees that came into the room.
“The primary challenge in this project was strategically positioning an optimal number of sensors to maintain precise and high-quality interaction, even during peak crowd periods,” says David-Alexandre.
The experience
If you saw videos on social media of guests walking through the room, touching the walls, and purposefully stepping on the floor to trigger interactivity, you likely noticed the sheer joy that an experience like this can evoke.
Experience our immersive room at ISE 2024
“Particles glowed under their feet, light explosions were triggered at the touch of their hands, ripples followed their path... Any movement had a direct impact on the visuals generated around them and made them co-creators of the artwork they witnessed,” says Marguerite of the experience. “We saw people laugh and be surprised by the magic of having visuals react so quickly under their touch, and many of them came back multiple times throughout the week to bring colleagues and share their experience.”
Working with partners to create exceptional, unforgettable experiences is part of what we do —thank you to Augmenta and THÉORIZ for helping us bring this experience to ISE 2024 and InfoComm 2024.
