Quartier des Spectacles in Montreal, Canada, is the world’s largest coordinated architectural projection installation, made possible by Show Control technology from Medialon.
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Covering one square kilometre, the Quartier des SpectacleMedias is an area of Montreal that is being reinvented as the cultural heart of the city with theatres, cabaret, restaurants, shopping centers, and outdoor music and art festivals. Buildings are being transformed by architectural projections on eight main sites and many more are set to join in. The projections feature artistic content as well as some interactive elements to allow members of the public to interact through gaming technologies.
The architectural projection installations operate every night and use specialised projector housings sited on the roofs of adjacent buildings. The housings contain the high powered projectors as well as the media servers, networking gear, show controllers, IP cameras, temperature and humidity sensors and climate controls.
The equipment is controlled by show controller Medialon Showmaster ST show controllers which schedules the shows; manages remote reboot of unresponsive devices; controls the temperature and humidity of the environment inside the projector housings and sends email alerts if there are malfunctions, failures or unusual climatic readings.
For the larger installations, multiple projector housings are needed that are linked together and managed by a single Medialon Showmaster ST show controller. Eachhousing still has its own local media server for its own projectors.
A standard set of equipment has been used for each installation which means that maintenance of the equipment is easier with fewer lines of spare parts required. While some of the installations are permanent, the temporary sites can also be set up more quickly allowing greater flexibility.
Medialon’s Showmaster ST show controllers at each site are connected to the main Quartier des Spectacles headquarters at the Place des Festivals by dedicated fiber optics, microwave radio transmission or through a virtual private network on the Internet. System Administrators can even control, monitor and synchronise all the sites from their iPhones, including pulling up camera views from each site’s IP cameras and even turning off street lights during the shows.
