Museum of sound and image lit up with 11 million pixels

Ten Christie projectors are producing more than 11 million pixels of art in an immersive room at the recently reopened Chico Albuquerque Museum of Image and Sound of Ceará, in Brazil.

The revamped museum – which preserves, disseminates and researches the AV heritage of the state of Ceará, and has more than 200,000 items in its collection – is home to 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.

The immersive room features 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 a projection on the walls and floor – in a parallelepiped format measuring 14.2m wide, 15.5m long and 5.7 metres 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, with a second server used for the floor. Christie Mystique is employed to quickly align the projection on the walls.

Adriano Luiz da Cunha, an electronic engineer at ALCom, the project integrator, says: “Pandoras Box is a powerful system for managing and running visuals. It is proving essential for the museum.

“The system allows us to compose a complete image from various content archives, without the slightest dip in performance. It also allows us to generate content separately for each individual screen, which makes the rendering process in content creation so much easier.”

Two Christie D20WU-HS projectors, mounted on mobile elevated platforms, and a Pandoras Box server are also used to project on to the facade of the museum for special events. The surface, which is 35.2m wide by 11.4m high, has a total resolution of 3336 x 1080 pixels.

Da Cunha says the Christie projectors are the perfect fit for the project: “These laser projectors don’t require lamp changes, which would have been difficult in the museum’s immersive room 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.”