Audiovisual: Dataton’s WATCHOUT Creates Spectacular exhibition at InfoComm China

Meet Dataton at InfoComm China, April 11-13, Stand F10-01, China National Convention Center, Beijing

Swedish show control developer and manufacturer, Dataton, has announced one of their biggest technology roll-outs to date with the supply of its WATCHOUT, a multimedia content playback solution for a multi-faceted 228m screen.

WATCHOUT will feature as part of a Chinese exhibition entitled ‘Old Beijing Gets Moving’ at InfoComm China in April, taking place at the China National Convention Centre, Beijing. The exhibition takes in ‘A Glance Round Old Beijing’, a famous panorama of the 1930s Beijing originally created by artist Wang Daguan.

WATCHOUT seamlessly blends and synchronizes images from 56 digital projectors, bringing Duguan’s painting to life as a remarkable animated video. The video tells the story of people’s lives in old Beijing and has enhanced, moving imagery of up to 1000 ancient buildings, from temples, to homes and shops.

Visitors to the exhibition are greeted by a bespoke, three metre high, 228 metre long projection screen which allows visitors to embark on a journey around old Beijing. The screen takes numerous right-angled turns, which allows guests to view some parts of the animation parallel with another, giving a fresh experience with every turn.

“The theme of the exhibition is ‘Watch Old Beijing, Love New Beijing’, ” explains Kenneth Cheung of Audio Visual Technique, Dataton’s local partner.

“Many of the buildings represented in Wang Daguan’s original painting are long gone, so the idea was to apply new technology in a way that would bring them back to life for today’s generation.”

“The creative team responsible for ‘Old Beijing Gets Moving’ is the same one that created the acclaimed Riverside Scene in the Chinese Pavilion of the Shanghai World Expo. We thought that was an extraordinary achievement of digital programming and animation, but this new Beijing exhibition outshines it not just in terms of scale but also in terms of creativity, artistic depth and sheer ambition.”

Local systems integrator An Heng Group were responsible for the exhibition’s AV infrastructure and were supplied with WATCHOUT licenses by Audio Visual Technique. The technology was chosen for its “geometry correction capabilities” and image blending abilities. WATCHOUT can also be controlled easily from the exhibition’s Creston control system.

Fredrik Svahnberg, Marketing Director at Dataton, observes: “Our partners in Asia continue to astound us with the scale and ambition of their work, and ‘Old Beijing Gets Moving’ is a perfect example. It is hard to imagine a multimedia installation of this scale being accomplished with anything other than WATCHOUT, and we are delighted to have been the supplier of choice for such a spectacular and historically important project.”