Created by owner Phillippe Baeijens and Architects 4A, and with visual design by Luc Peumans' Painting With Light, the Royal Bowl was designed to combine a bowling alley with a restaurant and dance area. In the words of Candela project manager Geert Custers, "They created a bowling venue of a type never seen before in Belgium - a place where people could enjoy a complete night out."
The installation covers the venue's bowling lanes, restaurant, bars and dance floor with an integrated system that puts lighting, audio and video under the control of an E:cue system, commanded by a pair of ELO touch screens, programmed by Custers. "This makes the system simple for non-technical bar staff to control," he says, "including all of the 200 LED fixtures and 20 moving lights, three audio zones, big video screens, video projectors and media servers."
Candela installed the lighting and E:cue control systems, while the Ampco Belgium team was responsible for Royal Bowl's audio system, which features Martin Audio AQ 10, AQ 5, AQ 112 and AQ 212 loudspeakers, with Vieta Do-2 units for the dining area, using Crest CC 2800 and CC 4000 power amplifiers and a Peavey Digitool MX 1 8 in / 8 out processor, commanded via RS232 from a custom touch screen designed by Candela's Geert Custers. Video includes five large Multivision projection screens over the 18 bowling lanes with Sanyo projectors and an integrated media server.
A key part of Peumans' design is the interaction between moving lights and custom designed, translucent LED lighting cylinders between the bowling lanes. Each column can change colours in two independently animated zones, via LinkLeds in the top and bottom parts of the cylinders. 20 StarLED Floorspot Blue LED fixtures delineate the bowling lanes, and are programmed to respond to the bowling action - triggering, for example, a LED-and-lighting animation whenever someone throws a successful strike.
"The E:cue system receives Ethernet data from the central computer of the bowling alley to our control system," says Custers, "which in turn triggers four moving lights that move to the face of the player who threw the strike and start strobing. The system is even programmed to provide a basic walk-in lighting state so when the staff arrive in the morning, they don't have to go around switching on numerous sets of house lights."
(Jim Evans)
