Christie Pandoras Box at Meraas City Walk
- Details
Meraas approached Float4, an award-winning studio that designs and produces site-specific interactive multimedia installations, to create a digital feature for City Walk. The scope grew to encompass an outdoor digital experience that includes more than 30 LED installations, nearly 30 projectors, and a water fountain show that uses water screens. In total, there are over 100m pixels that cover a space the size of 12 football fields.
“Meraas wanted to differentiate themselves,” says Alexandre Simionescu, co-founder of Float4. “One of the things they wanted to do was create a location that was pedestrian-friendly. It’s not something that you find in Dubai, so they’re very innovative. They like to question things beyond ‘can we do it bigger’ and ask ‘can we do it better?’“
Float4 worked with XYZ Cultural Technology, a long-time Christie partner, to design a system powerful enough to synchronize and control all 100 million pixels. XYZ used Christie Pandoras Box Players, Managers and Widget Designer to manage the entire digital experience.
Eric Cyr, partner and co-founder, XYZ, says, “Christie Pandoras Box includes the strong technologies that let us achieve a synchronized and immersive space of this size. It is a server with strong acquisition capabilities that can keep all these playbacks in sync, and has a strong logic to create the schedules we need.”
Christie Pandoras Box allowed XYZ to seamlessly manage varied, scheduled content – including ambiance, advertising, and show content – on different surfaces while providing proof of playback to sync it all together.
“There’s a daytime and night show, ambience, publicity – we were able to give them a system that synced. The nice thing with Christie Pandoras Box is that one system always has the same content as the others. Just by changing the matrix and IP address, we were able to have a spare player in two minutes,” adds Cyr.
(Jim Evans)
