QED provides Roadsters for Toyota 3D Launch

17 December 2010

UK - Four powerful Christie Roadster HD18K 3-chip DLP projectors provided the icing on the cake for a viral marketing campaign that took place over three days in a tunnel in Shoreditch recently.

Curious passers-by were treated to a visual installation, entitled Get Your Energy Back, which used the latest 3D projection mapping techniques to dramatise the technology contained within the new Toyota Auris Hybrid car. The resulting film of the occasion has proved a massive hit on social sites.

Creative advertising agency glue Isobar created and produced the event, generating 90 seconds of visual animation for the projection. The sequence showed the body of the Auris transforming and peeling back to reveal a glowing blue energy, which then escaped and interacted with various objects within the tunnel where the car was situated. The energy then returned to the car, bringing to life the amazing way in which the Auris recycles its energy as it drives.

To achieve this effect required extremely high-powered projectors, as the surfaces being illuminated included concrete, brick and asphalt as well as the white pearlescent material of the car.

Colin Yellowley, managing director of Igloo Vision, the software developers and designers responsible for the projection mapping, turned to Paul Wigfield at QED, and he recommended the Christie solution.

"We were contacted when Igloo were doing initial projector tests within the environment,"" confirmed Wigfield. "They realised that they needed seriously bright, vibrant projectors particularly when the content moved from the car to the environment itself, which covered a much larger area. We initially thought they would need eight HD18Ks - but after carrying out a projection test we were able to achieve the effect with just four.""

four HD18K projectors were clamped to a scaffold tower using QED's specialist flying frames. Fitted with 1.1:1 lenses, they flooded the entire tunnel, with the image blended within the source software.

Each projector took a feed from the Igloo PC in 1920 x 1080 native resolution. QED supplied four fibre lines which provided each projector with the DVI signal and full Ethernet control. ""With the projectors being placed so high up, one concern was the stability of the projectors, which were mounted at a variety of angles,"" explained Wigfield. ""But we needn't have worried, as the rigging design and implementation was extremely well planned and organised."

Summing up, Paul Wigfield said, "We always push the Roadster HD18K because it is the best and brightest single phase HD projector in the world, and from a budgetary viewpoint it was great that we were able to do the job with four, rather than the eight that had initially been estimated."

(Jim Evans)