Digital Projection offers spectacular visual immersion to visitors to Dubai City Walk

This new commercial centre in the Arab emirate has 34 projectors from this manufacturer's Titan range, that form the visual backbone of the installation, while combining with digital displays to deliver more than one hundred million pixels.

With 85.700 m2, Dubai's City Walk shopping mall offers a high-quality setting designed as a gigantic pedestrian promenade with shopping streets, of restaurants and entertainment areas in which the combination and integration of visual elements foster a unique experience for all those who visit it.

The developer and owner of the center, Dubai Meraas Holding, hired the Canadian studio Float4, specialized in creating digital experiences based in Montreal, for content creation, the programming strategy and the design of the technological infrastructure of the public spaces of the City Walk through its subsidiary XYZ Cultural Technology. Currently, This project has positioned itself as the largest multimedia experience in the world integrated into the architecture of a shopping mall.

XYZ Cultural Technology experts designed, They supplied and programmed a robust multimedia system that allows all elements of the facility to operate continuously and perfectly synchronized and ensure a "holistic integration of all visual elements and their individual characteristics". The company is also responsible for its operation and maintenance during the first year of activity.

The multimedia project carried out in the Dubai City Walk shopping centre is based on the projectors of the Titan range of Digital Projection, which previously and after passing all the tests and requirements were specified by the Dubai integrator RDK.

"We reached a point where many decisions had been made regarding each individual feature," explains Alexandre Simionescu, co-founder of Float4. Our role in these projects is to be like an executive producer: we ensure that technology and content work together and are designed appropriately.".

The system for controlling and broadcasting multimedia shows, developed and designed by XYC Cultural Technology, facilitates transmission through 34 Digital Projection Projectors; Three hundred lamps; four water screens with motor and thirty Led screens of twenty-one different formats, on an area equivalent to twelve American football fields.

All elements communicate automatically and continuously in an arid outdoor environment. In total, 33 servers that transmit more than 100 Million pixels; 7.000 meters of fiber optics and 33.000 meters of video cable were needed to bring to life the dazzling digital experience of the City Walk areas or streets.

Specifically, in the Show Street area, a walkway flanked by retail spaces and restaurants, which in turn opens onto the Place de Lumière, as an entertainment center, twelve Titan digital projectors installed 930, of 15.000 lumens and WUXGA resolution, housed in Tempest boxes, that unfold on the ground. The projection is combined with Led visuals along the street and Led strips, Large enough to display moving images.

"The projectors were mounted discreetly and the ColorMax technology ensured that they could all be easily calibrated to ensure a perfect and synchronized mix across multiple channels. In addition, The dual lamp system allows for redundancy ensuring that the show can run without interruption if one of them needs to be changed.", Simionescu points out.

Every night and at regular intervals, three different visual shows created by Float4 are performed, with projections on the facades of the central square and on the Led screens distributed throughout the enclosure, for which a total of eighteen Titan projectors are used 930 set up around this space, creating a great digital canvas with more than 120 Different Elements.

Large distribution and projection surfaces, all of different dimensions, and the formats specific to each medium contributed to the complexity of the project. The main challenge that XYZ's specialists had to face was to maintain the link between the construction team and its various subcontractors, originating from ten different countries, in order to integrate and connect systems with each other.