Dataton, the Swedish developers of outstanding audio visual products for professionals, have supplied WATCHOUT™ multi-image technology to the newly refurbished Het Scheepvaartmuseum, the Dutch National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam.
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The highlight of the themed interactive exhibits is the ‘Voyage at Sea’, an immersive experience in which the visitor walks through five hundred years of the Netherlands’ maritime past. The focus of the exhibit is a panoramic 360 degree, elliptical projection using ten edge-blended projectors. The show is controlled by a Medialon show controller, including Dataton’s WATCHOUT™ as a cluster. The distribution of the projectors within the space meant that edge blending was particularly difficult and WATCHOUT™’s edge-blending and geometric-correction tools were invaluable.
The WATCHOUT™ multi-display, timeline-based software system is fully scalable, software-based and requires no proprietary hardware. The system orchestrates still images, animations, graphics, video, sound and live feeds into a single impressive show across multiple 
display areas, either soft-edge blended or scattered, curved or flat.
Video for the ‘Voyage at Sea’ exhibit is played back through QuickTime ProRes software, via five dual-motherboard PCs, each with two WATCHOUT™ licenses. The WATCHOUT™ devices, located in the central server room with the content servers, lighting controllers and network switches, also provide eight tracks of audio, routed via a Richmond SoundMan server, to create the soundtrack for the room’s 12.2-channel surround-sound system.
Jorinde Wiegel of Rapenburg Plaza, who supplied the AV, lighting and network design says that the WATCHOUT™ “system performed faultlessly, proving both technically extremely accurate and also very easy to use.”
Jan Breel at AV Trade, deliver Dataton’s WATCHOUT™ to many of their projects. He was “very proud” of this particular project and with regard to WATCHOUT™ commented that, “the technology worked very well and was delivered on time and within budget.”
Fredrik Svahnberg, Marketing and Communications Manager, Dataton, concludes: “The ‘Voyage at Sea’ is a great example of how our WATCHOUT™ technology can be used not only to create a wonderful immersive visitor experience, but also to tame a less-than-ideal projection and display setup when such an arrangement is necessitated by the nature of the original space.”
