CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

Tim Sinnaeve, Managing Director, Barco Residential, gives his opinion on the future health of the partnership between projectors and screens.

In my opinion and paraphrasing Mark Twain (who by the way was an early investor in new technology), “The report of projection’s death is an exaggeration.” Or to put it less diplomatically, a travesty! While exciting new(er) technologies have come to the market, like direct view LED, they do not replace, but complement projection as a key technology to create large, immersive images. This will remain true when these technologies become more cost-effective, since cost is not the only factor in creating a ‘tipping point’ for a newish technology.

It is of course natural for us technology companies to be focused on creating new technologies and comparing specs and pushing the envelope on the ‘next big thing’. But that also makes it easy to lose track of what it is that we are trying to achieve or bring to our clients.

At Barco Residential we see our mission as, ‘creating architectural digital canvases that enable the most immersive entertainment and cultural experiences in luxury homes for customers to share with loved ones’. While in our industry home cinema tends to be a primary focus, it is but one of these experiences, with exciting opportunities in high end gaming, new media art and wellness.

From a technology perspective, the different technologies we use to create our digital canvas can enable different experiences and projection remains a critical ingredient. Take a recent project we worked on for example, the Atlanta Show Home, illustrated below. A giant digital art canvas was created, using powerful projection, with the projector completely hidden behind a wall. When the art installation was not active, the wall reverted to just a wall, and during the day the light reflected from the pool onto that same wall became almost like a natural sundial for an entirely different experience. Now imagine having used direct view LED instead for this project, leaving aside for a moment the current cost factor, as well as the structural nightmare this would have entailed, can you imagine a giant black hole as the centre piece of your home when the art installation is not active? And of course, there would have been no natural sundial either…

In another project, we used direct view LED to create a custom new media art digital canvas, integrated into custom design furniture that was a centre piece in a light-flooded living room. The specific circumstances and design objectives of the artwork made direct view LED the material of choice to create our digital canvas in this case. And no, the highest possible resolution was not the driver, but rather the desired texture (or artist intent) of the artwork, with the corresponding dot pitch chosen to enable this.

You can discuss about specific cases of course, and sometimes two different technologies can both be viable options. Different things can come into play. Many people feel that projection makes for a more cinematic experience also influenced by the history of cinema and film making. This is completely aside from more ‘scientific’ technical considerations like sound transparency for screens for example.

That being said, the better the ingredients, the better experience we can create. So, it is important that we keep pushing the envelope there as well. Further advancements in this area, beyond a sometimes-singular focus on resolution, like HDR for example, are important and further improve our palette of technologies to create even better experiences. But things like architectural integration and enabling architects and designers are at least as important, so for our part you will see that we also put a lot of emphasis on that as well in our technology developments. With the architectural integration features built into our projectors, and complementary solutions by some of our partners, projection can allow you to ‘push over the wall’ for example and create a life-size ‘Window on the World’ taking away the very notion of screen, without being left with that big black hole we talked about when it’s just a wall. This not only opens a whole new world for our customers, but also for our industry. Which also brings us to screen technology as an important ingredient. Architects and Designers are very familiar with creating fabric walls. A small step then to use acoustically transparent woven screen materials as the wall fabric which will come natural to the design community.

In conclusion, I firmly believe that projection remains a key technology and innovative ‘design material’ to create unique experiences for our clients enabled by fully integrated solutions that perfectly complement the design and architecture of any residence.