Immersive Art Venues Put Projection Blending Back In Focus

Nubank Arte Lab opened in Sao Paulo on 15 August and was detailed publicly on 14 October, and its numbers read more like a broadcast facility than a gallery. The 2,700 square metre venue sits inside the Conjunto Nacional complex on Avenida Paulista and was designed for Aventura and Deeplab Project, with audiovisual design, supply, programming, calibration and commissioning by ON. Two immersive rooms of 23 by 9 metres, each with a four metre ceiling and 207 square metres of floor, receive projection on three walls and the floor up to a height of 3.85 metres. Twenty-nine Barco single-chip DLP laser-phosphor projectors do the work: eighteen G50-W6 units on the walls and eleven higher-output G62-W9 units on the floors, with two more held as operational spares. A 23 by 4 metre mirror in one room and a 9 by 4 metre mirror in the other close the visual field, alongside an 84 square metre transparent LED facade facing the public concourse and an 8,352-point 3D LED sculpture.

The performance targets explain why blending is back at the centre of the design conversation. The client asked for at least 150 lux with strong contrast and consistent colour across blended images; ON measured 218 lux on the walls and 174 lux on the floors. Getting there is not a matter of buying bright projectors. Fourteen and fifteen projectors per room have to be warped and edge-blended into what reads as one continuous surface, on walls that are also being used as mirrors, in a room whose content changes with every exhibition. ON specified DLP partly for black level and contrast, and a grey wall finish to stop highlights washing out. The result is a room that behaves as a neutral digital canvas rather than a system tuned to one show.

Playback is where the AV architecture shows. Eleven custom ON producer and player servers run Dataton Watchout for playback, warping and edge blending, so the exhibition can be remapped when the curatorial team changes the show instead of when the hardware is replaced. That is the same principle as a control room with redundant servers: the content layer is disposable, the routing and playback layer is not. Add an LED facade and a pixel-mapped sculpture that each need their own feeds, and the venue ends up with three parallel display systems, one show-control timeline and a small team expected to run all of it daily. Under those conditions, frame synchronisation, source switching without a visible glitch, and the ability to isolate one failed projector without blacking out a wall matter more than any single specification on a datasheet.

Amtune builds the deterministic routing layer that sits underneath this kind of room. The range includes HD video multi-viewers for previewing and confidence monitoring, seamless matrix and multi-view processor platforms for glitch-free source changes and windowed layouts, HD video seamless hybrid matrices for head-end routing, AV extenders to reach projector positions and gallery walls over category cable, and AV-over-IP codecs and decoders where the venue already runs a network. All units are manufactured under an ISO 9001 quality system and tested to CE, FCC and RoHS standards. Integrators can request signal chain diagrams and evaluation units at sales@amtune.com.