11 minute read
EXPO CITY
EXPO CITY DUBAI
BILD STUDIOS TURNS AL WASL PLAZA INTO THE WORLD’S LARGEST INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION FOR EXPO CITY DUBAI. TODD STASZKO REPORTS...
The gleaming focal point of the Expo 2020 Dubai site, Al Wasl Plaza became an instantly recognisable landmark during the six short months of Expo 2020 Dubai. The iconic domed trellis structure wowed Expo 2020 visitors with its fully integrated 360° immersive projection surface providing the canvas for some of the event’s most memorable shows.
Back in 2019, Bild Studios was commissioned by Creative Technology Middle East and Expo 2020 Dubai to produce the creative content pipelines to bring the structure to life, using 252 Christie 40K lumen projectors, which cover a surface of over 25,000 sq m across a 27,000 by 6,000-pixel canvas.
Having designed the content workflows that allow the entire interior of Al Wasl Plaza to be picture mapped with content, Bild has now turned the venue into the world’s biggest interactive installation for the opening of Expo 2020’s legacy project, Expo City Dubai.
Users of a specifically designed tablet screen can manipulate the projected content in real time with the movement of a finger.
“The creative team at Expo 2020, headed up by Executive Creative Director Amna Abulhoul, had a vision with two main objectives in mind,” explained David Bajt, Co-Founder and Director of Bild Studios.
“First, they wanted to create an impressive and highly immersive VIP experience, where chosen individuals could stand and generate stunning real-time visuals within the impressive architectural Al Wasl Plaza. The second objective was driven by much more of a practical nature – to lean on real-time generated content, created in Notch, to save time on pre-rendered content ingest and reserve hard drive space within the busy disguise gx 2 media server system.”
In addition to the visuals, there was an opportunity to generate interactive audio for the in-house L-Acoustics audio system, which is made up of 27 loudspeaker arrays and six subwoofer arrays.
“The result not only represents the world’s largest interactive visual installation, but also uses one of the world’s biggest audio installations, which reacts to the finger movement of the app user,” continued Bajt, who was the principal consultant at Bild for Al Wasl Plaza project. “We knew it would involve creating something new and unique, and it would require a huge amount of R&D and testing. Once we started and saw the first positive test results from our office setup, I knew that this could turn into something real – and very special.”
Bajt and his team split the project into four phases, which were implemented simultaneously: technical feasibility and creative exploration; app development; creative development and audio design; and on-site installation.
As background to the project, the workflow creation for the pre-rendered content was the first achievement by Bild for the original Expo 2020 Dubai project in 2019, which culminated in the company creating the broadcast Augmented Reality for the spectacular opening and closing ceremonies of Expo 2020 Dubai.
Content production for any curved surface requires a seamless flow across the dome, which can’t be achieved working with 2D graphics. With this, Bild created a workflow that lets artists create graphics in 3D software that also integrates into a 2D pipeline. In fact, the workflow allows artists to jump between 2D and 3D workflows while ensuring that the final video files are always generated to the right format and naming conventions. Converting the
huge setup for creating pre-rendered graphics into a real-time driven solution, which is then controlled with an iPad, was consequently the great challenge for this interactive installation.
‘A JAW-DROPPING SYNCHRONISED EXPERIENCE’ As the project grew to involve multiple contributors and creative teams, it was critical to develop a tool to provide content teams, clients and collaborators the ability to visualise how their creative visions would look on the dome.
With this in mind, Expo Dubai 2020 engaged the Bild team to develop a photo-real Virtual Reality visualiser to take the content workflows they had already created and make them accessible to Expo’s creative teams, allowing them to view the projection content in a 1:1 virtual setup of the dome, long before testing the content in the real dome. Created in Unreal Engine as a stand-alone application, the user could navigate around the inside of the dome across different times of day, swap out projection content, adjust content settings, add various FX and even export the simulation by rendering it into a 360° movie – ready to be viewed on YouTube by all stakeholders involved.
“The first phase in creation of the interactive installation centred around designing the realtime graphics pipeline, as well as creating the first set of real-time visuals, with focus on technical performance,” said Bajt. “The team also started to design and plan for the implementation of the iPad interface that the user would interact with to generate the visuals on the dome.” The 16 disguise gx 2 servers that were already on site were originally intended to only run pre-rendered video content. The choice of picking a real-time engine that could be added to the existing setup was not a hard decision.
“The obvious candidate was Notch – purely due to its long and well-established integration with disguise,” said Bajt. “It was imperative to create a Notch-disguise real-time pipeline that not only would allow artists to easily create stunning content, but also make sure that the content would integrate seamlessly with the existing disguise mapping workflows that our team had previously installed and verified onsite.”
Lewis Kyle White, Creative Lead of Bild Studios, explained how this was done. “The technical challenges for this installation were vast,” said White. “As with the pre-rendered content workflows, we had to divide the canvas into 11 different sections – each section’s graphics rendered in real-time by a different disguise gx 2 server. With the 27k by 6k canvas split up, each server would therefore render approximately 7k by 2k resolutions.”
Bajt added: “To render real-time graphics at these huge resolutions is one challenge, but to guarantee synchronisation between the servers is another. We therefore had to build a system that allowed us to perfectly emulate onsite conditions and guarantee there’d be no surprises onsite.”
After some initial testing and working with disguise to create some bespoke functionality, Bild’s methodology of turning the existing prerendered workflows into real-time pipelines proved highly successful.
“The challenge of rendering that resolution of content in real-time was something that had never been done before on this scale,” said Jamie Sunter, Technical Director, Bild Studios. “It took a lot of hard work to create a workflow that allowed us to optimise the performance and sync of the real-time content.”
With this element in progress, Bild worked in parallel to design a slick and simple app that was easy to interact with, and they settled on creating a bespoke web design interface on an iPad, using standard HTML and CSS. “This approach resulted in a simple and user-friendly UX design, with its home screen made up of a grid of thumbnails where the user can select an interactive treatment,” commented Bajt. “Once the user has selected a specific look, its specific controls open in a new window.”
A full CMS editor system was developed in the back end, which allows the client to customise exactly what elements to include when creating a new look. “Most interactive treatments require a finger tracking interface, access to a texture library and a colour picker,” continued Bajt.
“Other treatments may have only required a few slider and texture inputs. With the CMS system in place, a user can choose web elements to include and connect them to corresponding properties in the disguise project.” The new
Indirections feature by disguise allows for video and image content that is stored in a disguise project to be accessed and switched on the fly from the iPad. Indirections also allows images to automatically be pushed to the iPad and be represented as thumbnails, with no need to update the app. With this, users can change the texture directly from the app and choose to map it in different ways on the surface of the dome.
The finger-tracking functionality of the app allows the user to track their finger on a flattened image version of the dome. These movements are then captured, in real-time as OSC coordinates, which are sent to Notch via a web server, then to disguise, and rendered as visuals directly onto the dome. For example, gigantic particle trails or massive virtual searchlights follow the movement of the finger.
Adding to this visual element is the interactive audio setup, with trajectories of sound effects generated based on the finger placement of the user and mapped to the 27 loudspeaker arrays in the space. With each movement, an additional layer of audio is mapped to the closest speakers to the visuals, creating a fully immersive 360° AV experience.
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Grayscale version
Amna Abulhoul, Executive Creative Director, Expo City Dubai
“The sound isn’t generated using a procedural sound algorithm but the movement of the audio is,” stated Bajt. “A pre-created mono-channelled sound file is mapped onto the closest speaker based on tracked finger movements of the user.”
With a significant amount of testing and verification during pre-production in the office, the technical installation proved to be a smooth and successful process. “The server-performance matched the performance and all servers synced well, as expected,” said Bajt.
“A significant amount of time was spent on colour-correcting the graphics, as certain colours appeared a lot more vibrant than others, and certain graphical elements simply had to be refined to appear bigger and bolder to maximise the interactive impact.”
The impact of the audio was surprisingly impressive to Bajt and his team. “While the team expected the audio to enhance the interactive experience, it came as a great surprise what an extraordinary layer it added,” he commented. “When interactive visuals follow the finger movement, with accompanying audio travelling through, it truly creates a jaw-dropping synchronised experience.”
For Bajt, the project became more and more thrilling as it got closer to realisation. “With each step of the process, the project became more exciting,” he said. “Around half of the first looks we tried performed and synced well, and those early tests of our iPad app, while still running as a webpage on a laptop and with emulated finger action, were met with hugely positive reactions from all involved.
“Once we added disguise’s Indirections to swap textures on the dome, we saw the full picture in more clarity. Then once it was installed onsite, we could see the excitement in people’s eyes when they used the app. It gave me, and the team, a huge sense of accomplishment. For me, it is more about the journey and gradually seeing
the pieces of the puzzle come together – and seeing creative opportunities arise during the process is also a huge thrill.”
Expo City Dubai Executive Creative Director, Amna Abulhoul is delighted with the results of the project. “This innovative, real-time technology is part of the exciting future of Expo City Dubai – a destination that will showcase all manner of new ideas and solutions,” she said.
“As we worked through the stages of this interactive experience, Bild and Expo City Dubai worked as one team, with one mission and one goal. I can’t wait to see how the experience at Al Wasl grows and develops through groundbreaking innovations such as this.”
Coming from an animation background, Abulhoul places great importance on being able to change and adjust the graphics until the very last minute. “I want to be able to maintain the flexibility all the way to showtime,” she stated. “What triggered me to come up with the idea of creating an interactive application for Al Wasl Plaza was the requests we got for making graphics quickly, sometimes for a show the day after. People not experienced in the creative and technical world do not understand the need for rendering time, despite the enormous 27k by 6k resolution of the dome.”
Now, with the expertise of Bild and the collaboration with the creative minds at Expo 2020 and disguise, Al Wasl Plaza sits proudly as an interactive piece of art and the most complex and largest video installation in the world. Photos: Bild Studios www.expocitydubai.com www.bildstudios.com
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