AMSTERDAM – The Netherlands’ Het Scheepvaartmuseum, which reopened last fall after being refurbished, offers visitors a new exhibit, Voyage at Sea. The five-room walk-through experience, which details the Netherlands’ maritime history, includes an oval 360° viewing area lit by 10 projectors.
Integration firm Rapenburg Plaza, which provided the exhibit’s AV, lighting and network design, incorporated Dataton Watchout technology to give visitors an immersive viewing experience. Along with the 10 edge-blended projectors, each with wide angle lenses, Rapenburg Plaza custom-designed “snap-on” cartridges for additional image filtering.
“Because of the way they had to be mounted and distributed in the room, it was impossible to create an equal physical overlap between each of the 10 projectors,” noted Jorinde Wiegel of Rapenburg Plaza. “So the edge-blending required a great deal of tweaking, including some adaptation of the actual content itself.”
That content was provided by Amsterdam-based Tungsten to an original design concept by Utrecht-based Tinker Imagineers. The movie is played back through QuickTime ProRes software and is run through five dual-motherboard PCs, each running two licenses of Watchout.
The Watchout machines, which are located in the museum’s central server room alongside the content servers, lighting controllers and network switches, also provide eight tracks of audio; these are routed through a Richmond SoundMan server to create the soundtrack for the room’s 12.2-channel surround-sound system.
“The whole show is controlled by a Medialon show controller, with Watchout controlled as a cluster within the Medialon system,” said Wiegel. “We made extensive use of the edge-blending and geometric-correction tools within Watchout, and the system performed faultlessly, proving both technically extremely accurate and also easy to use.”
“We deliver Watchout to many exciting projects in the Benelux and this project is one we are proud of,” said Jan Breel at AV Trade. “The technology worked well and was delivered on time and within budget.”
