Using projection mapping technology to bring art to life

To achieve this impact, the exhibit had to be designed around the exact specifications of the 1,022 square meters space of the Toronto Star building, according to Lighthouse Immersive Co-Founder and Producer Corey Ross. One of the things that separate this experience from other exhibits, he says, was the way his team eschewed the traditional method of putting up temporary walls or screens for the projections. In this exhibit, the walls, pillars and floors - all made of metal, brick and concrete - are themselves the canvass for the imagery.

CHALLENGES
Design and build an immersive exhibit based on the artwork of Vincent van Gogh that completely transforms the interior of the Toronto Star building by creating a 360-degree experience for visitors. To achieve the effect, the room must be fitted with projectors mapped to the walls that can provide enough precision and detail to create a single, large and seamless image.

SOLUTIONS
Utilizing 53 Panasonic PT-RZ770 laser projectors and an internal network, the Lighthouse Immersive team created a mosaic of images that come together to create a wholly immersive, 360-degree experience. By utilizing the projector's Edge Blending and Color Matching feature, the team was able to match the edges of the individual projectors and create large smooth and seamless images.

RESULTS
Opening amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the Lighthouse Immersive team created a second, drive-through experience, which required an additional 53 projectors and operates in tandem with the traditional walk-in experience. Both exhibits create an immersive experience for visitors and have sold out through their initial run, which has since received glowing reviews in online forums. Lighthouse Immersive has also reported minimal maintenance and upkeep required since the exhibit has opened.

Bringing Van Gogh to life

Sean Richards, Project Manager at Lighthouse Immersive, worked to make these creative concepts a physical reality from a technical standpoint. With 25 years of experience in stage and event design, creating a grid from which projectors could be fastened was the easy part. The hardest part would be designing a layout of projectors that could map to the walls of the Toronto Star building.

To develop the exhibit, Lighthouse Immersive worked with the creative and artistic teams from Europe, and both groups knew the goal of creating a truly immersive experience left little to no room for imprecision. After developing the plans that would allow the team to map the images to the walls, floors and columns of the Toronto Star building, they began looking for projection solutions that would best fulfill these plans.

Finding the right solution

Based on the level of precision needed - and other considerations such as energy usage, heat and durability the team agreed that laser projectors were a better solution than lamp-based alternatives. The design called for 53 projectors to be run in tandem to create images that are 8 meter high and up to 52 meter wide across the building's walls and columns. Ultimately, the team decided to utilize the projectors in portrait mode - as opposed to landscape - to achieve the image height in these designs. This meant finding projectors with flexible installation, superior side-shifting and edge-blending to create the desired immersive impact.

When utilizing side-shifting, the projector is placed at the top of an image, and the optics are shifted to project the image without distortion. Using the Panasonic PT-RZ770 projectors, the team at Lighthouse Immersive was able to maximize the shift, utilizing the 360- degree free installation feature and have the projectors at a maximum downward angle of six degrees with the projector five meters from the wall. This flexibility enables projection from virtually any angle. 

“That is a pretty impressive amount of side-shifting considering we're using the projectors in portrait mode,” Richards says. “I would've expected that in landscape, but that's a very long image in portrait mode considering the lens is practically at the top of the image and the projector is fairly close to the wall.” 

Beyond simply side-shifting, these images need to blend at the seams since each projector's image is a single piece of the whole experience. With such extensive side-shifting, Richards says the concern becomes a distortion of the images' edges in the form of softening. These softer edges would make it impossible to blend these separate images seamlessly and impact the overall immersion of the experience.

“The good thing is that each projector was precise and sharp in the same way,” Richards says. “I would imagine there would be a degree of variation in a [lamp projector] - and that could even change over time. It would make it impossible to use the edges of the image because it wouldn't be precise enough.”