Worlds of Wonder

BY JENNIFER WILLIAMS

Going on safari in Africa. Walking on the moon. Exploring the depths of the Mariana Trench. These are all things that most people will never experience for themselves.

But thanks to a perfect blend of technology, art and science, the Illuminarium Experience brings these experiences to life for visitors to their Atlanta and now Las Vegas locations. With a combination of 4K interactive projection, 360° audio, in-floor vibrations and even scent systems, Illuminarium experiences are like no other.

“I like to call it cinematic immersion,” says Brian Allen, executive vice president of technology and content integration for the Illuminarium Experience, which opened last summer in Atlanta and earlier this year in Las Vegas. “We have this sort of technology cocktail, layering different things on top of each other to orchestrate this experience.”

“One of the very first hurdles we had to get around was how [to] have localized audio that’s completely invisible,” he explained. “We needed a surface that was both acoustically transparent and reflective, and that didn’t really exist. This is where some specialized, carbon-fiber panels come into play.”

The Illuminarium creators worked with Strong/MDI Screen Solutions out of Canada that “already had a product that was in this realm of specialized panels and featured hidden speakers in the walls,” said Allen, “but they didn’t have one to our scale.”

MDI developed a custom optical coating for the Illuminarium, a proprietary, high-contrast Orion optical coating to be applied to all the projection walls within the venue, as well as providing the patented speaker panels which allow the audio to penetrate through a solid projection surface with minimal distortion that is invisible to the human eye.

“The coating is essentially reflective, so it has certain ‘gain’ to it, as we call it in the projection world,” says Allen. “One of the reasons we went with this product is that is helps reduce reflective pollution—all of our walls are curved, and so when you’re throwing light on every angle of that wall, you’re normally going to get a lot of cross-reflection bounce, but this specialized coating helps minimize that.” The coating also delivers wide viewing angles, making it an excellent fit for giant, immersive displays with mobile viewers.

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‘’Our team implemented some of the very critical technical elements within the venue, ultimately helping Illuminarium achieve their final vision to provide the most realistic immersive experience possible,” says Dustin Small, director of special projects for Strong/MDI. “Working side-by-side with Illuminarium’s technical staff, we have helped create a truly unique venue that is sure to please all audiences.”

This proprietary coating is put onto the panels, which are then essentially mudded into the wall, from a Sheetrock perspective, explains Allen. “We spent a lot of time and effort working with our contractors to essentially invent a wall specification. In architecture, you have certain specifications for how smooth and how straight a wall should be. Level 5 is usually the highest people go in construction, but we found we needed something better than that, because our wall isn’t just a wall, it’s a screen.”

So they invented a new wall spec, he says. “We call it the Level 5-plus or Level 5-Illuminarium spec. Because as soon as you have even a slight bump or wave in the wall, that affects the image being projected, and we don’t want that. We had to make it as flat as possible, as durable as possible and with the proper expansion joints. That was the first step—to have a very, very good wall.”

The next important step, says Allen, was securing the audio, and Illuminarium found their audio partner in HOLOPLOT out of Berlin, Germany. “HOLOPLOT really already had the technology, but also had the vision to expand on that technology to bring audio to our space that was truly immersive and truly specialized,” says Allen.

“Going into designing the Illuminarium space, we knew off the bat we

needed the world’s best audio, the world’s best video, the world’s best interactive technology to really pull this off,” he says. “The X1 really allows us, through its toolset, the capability to work with designers and creators in ways that they’ve never even dreamed of. Where HOLOPLOT and the X1 system really shine is the ability to truly use 3D audio-beamforming and wave field synthesis…to combine those two technologies and make sound isolated to a certain physical space within our venues.”

Natalia Szczepanczyk, sound system design engineer at HOLOPLOT, says one of the great capabilities of the X1 system is being able to focus sound and actually project it exactly where wanted. “So something that is traditionally available primarily to light is now possible for sound,” she says.

“The speakers at ear height are positioned behind a very special material—it’s a micro-perforated panel that is coated with a special paint which essentially allows for the projections to still be

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very beautifully visible on it from inside the room, but it also allows the sound to completely, freely pass through,” says Szczepanczyk. “Therefore, as the visitor, you’ll see the image perfectly and you’ll hear the sound image also as perfect.”

Each HOLOPLOT speaker is about one meter squared, says Allen, and each one has 96 smaller speakers inside. “We had to imbed these into our walls because we have a ring of ear-height speakers,” he says. “Localization of sound is very important to us, but at the same time, we didn’t want a visible ring of speakers to detract from the visual experience.”

Allen says Illuminarium is excited to now see where this new technology experience will go. “We’ve built this new format (like IMAX or 35 mm formats) with criteria or specifications to go along with it,” he explains. “But we are not the gatekeepers…we want to open the format to other content creators. It’s more about coaching people on what works and what doesn’t.” s p

Visit www.Illuminarium.com for more information.

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