NAB 2016: Christie Shows Off Projection Mapping With In-Booth Model Ice Rink

NAB Show attendees accustomed to Christie’s usual array of eye-catching LED displays found themselves drawn to the company’s booth for a different reason this year: a scaled-down model ice rink — complete with luxury box and miniature Zamboni — to show off an impressive projection-mapping demo.

Christie’s booth housed a model ice rink to demonstrate projection mapping.

Christie installed four Boxer 2K30 projectors — making their North American debut — above the rink, with cameras perched on either side of each projector. Launched in January, the 4K-upgradable and omnidirectional Boxer 2K30 delivers brightness and is both durable and flexible for its size and weight. The installation also featured the company’s Pandoras Box 5.9 media servers, which enable the tracking of on-ice objects, such as a puck.

“The really sweet spot of what we wanted to show was that we have all of these pieces that we can join together and make solutions that are accessible for professional sports all the way down through to college level,” says Jeevan Vivegananthan, senior director, product management, displays and processing (non-cinema), Christie. “We want to [show] people that they don’t have to feel intimidated, especially college sports where the budgets are maybe smaller. … We wanted to show here at NAB that this kind of technology is accessible to everybody.”

Four Boxer 2K30 projectors were installed above the booth for the mapping demo.

Christie also showed off how the system can be automatically calibrated by building an even smaller scale model of an ice rink and shifting the projectors and cameras off-center, in order to demonstrate how automatic calibration can save users the time and frustration of having to manually align cameras and projectors.

“It’s one thing to set something up, but [you need] to make sure it works consistently — week after week, show after show, game after game,” says Vivegananthan. “You can automatically calibrate and be able to maintain things and, when something’s wrong, push a button and recalibrate.”

A small scale model of an ice rink showed off automatic calibration.

Within the luxury box, Christie added a Christie FHQ981-L flat-panel display that looked down toward the ice; above the lounge, the company stationed two Christie D13HD-HS laser phosphor projectors and the Christie Captiva DHD400S featuring an ultra-short throw lens. To the lounge’s right was the Christie FHQ842-T UHD with Layer Logic’s touch control. To the left, Christie demonstrated its Pandoras Box 5.9 gesture-based interactivity with Airscan on a 48 Christie MicroTiles display. The content was managed by the Christie Spyder X20 video processor.