I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Justin Heideman and I recently started in the New Media Initiatives department. Eric filled in the details about me in a previous post, so I won’t duplicate it here. Suffice to say, with Eric’s departure, I have some very big shoes to fill.
Before Eric left, he worked on updating the design of the Hennepin signage to incorporate the Walker’s new graphic identity. The updated design went live several weeks ago. I captured two short clips of the updated design in action.
Thirdly, this isn’t new media strictly speaking, but I thought I’d throw it in for fun. After a series of bad weather, last night’s movie in the park was definitely not rained out. In fact, the weather was absolutely perfect. I was able to take a few shots of the crowd in Loring Park before the movie started and built a little panorama shot to capture some of the essence of the scene:
Our current installation of the projected signage on Hennepin Avenue has been up and running since the opening but again we didn’t have any sort of complete documentation for it online. Brian Dehler and Eleanor Savage of the Walker’s Events & Media Production department had put this video together that shows the projected signage in different circumstances. In twilight when the letters are ghostly but mostly legible, the small letters seen on the interior, and at night when the Walker’s lights are off and the projection displays most vividly.
Small Quicktime:Hennepin Signage(6MB)
Large Quicktime:Hennepin Signage(~30MB)
It seems like we have reached some sort of milestone for our biggest dynamic signage project. The giant projection on Hennepin Ave. is now using information coming out of our database. Unfortunately there is still a little bit of work I have to do every day transporting images because (1) Watchout uses windows machines that we can’t expose to our network because their settings are insecure and (2) we don’t have a VLAN set up yet to securely connect to them. So that means I still move the dynamically generated content back and forth on a physical CD. The good news is that Nate wrote a program that pulls data out of our calendar database and writes 3 big PNG graphics each containing a number of events spaced out evenly. I just have to upload graphics to the right directory on the Watchout server press refresh and it updates. Watchout doesn’t really seem to be built for this since it isn’t mentioned in any of the documentation but it does work.
We had intermitent crashes of the control computer of our system which means the system just shows black instead of our sign. I haven’t been able to pin it down specifically but I started using Guidemaker to start and stop Watchout programs instead of leaving one running over night. This seems to have stopped or slowed down the problem which leads me to guess it might be a memory leak in the playback of the Watchout timeline. One more thing to watchout for.
Well everything was in place two days before the press arrived for the official press preview. Then somehow two of the projectors got messed up when their autosync malfunctioned. The guys from SPL and Larry from AV took a couple hours to sort it all out. Everything should be good for the press preview today and donor reception tonight.
The projection is a bit splotchy but I think it ended up looking mysterious since the glass is still mostly transparent. The huge letters are legible from a long ways away and make up for most of the dim zones. We also found that if we move the letters faster it appears like the words shimmer. I was told someone from HGA could read the sign from Loring Park when the big letters were on. So far this project seems like its going to be a great place for our announcements.
Here is some documentation with real content in it.
I took some video from the sidewalk, from the crosswalk and from across Hennepin Avenue.
We did a final round of testing with a clearer vinyl film by 3m. I think there was a general concensus that it was the best looking on the glass and the least intrusive in the space from the inside and outside. The projection showed some hotspots during the day and the colors were not perfect though. Over all though it the projection showed up good enough to be very impressive. Especially with bold black and white graphics. In the end I think everyone seemed to accept that the little loss in image quality was more than compensated for by the more subtle appreance of the film on the glass.
Now to install the film we hired some experts (i don’t know what company sorry). They came in and had to build these wooden platforms between the two window walls so they could reach the frosted area. It seemed slow going, they had to stop a few times to set up fans and cool down the window cavity. I guess they didn’t want the glass to crack from the temperature difference. Here are some picts of the scaffolding inside the windows.
Yesterday and last night we tested more films for the projection screen facing Hennepin Ave. There were several candidates. One from a Kimoto a japanese company, a 3M film, a standard rear projection fabric by Da-Lite as well as their Holo Screen and a version of their standard fabric applied to plexiglass.
The 3M film is not an optical film just a vinyl film meant to simulate frosting. Surprisingly in combination with the frosting that is already on the glass we get pretty good light dispersion. There are still hotspots on this during the day but they are not bad. This solution has the advantage of being cheap, fast to install and less obtrusive to the curtain wall because it adheres directly to the glass. It also comes in a variety of colors and opacities so we can better match the color of the glass.
The Kimoto film looked very bright. It dispersed the light better than the 3M film but not as good as the Da-Lite screens. Being a film that could be applied to the film this has most of the same advantages of the 3M film. Unfortunately they can not manufacture this in a 6ft width so our window would have seams in it; also this manufacturer is in Japan and not is not carried by anyone locally so it would take at least a week for delivery. There are still hotspots in this film but they are not very noticable.
The 3 Da-Lite screens are manufactured to be used for rear projection. The heavy gray screen gave us the sharpest picture and the greatest viewing angle. It was also had the best viewing angle during the day with a lot of ambient light. As a product of its light dispersion it actually looked the dimmest. The Da-Lite rep said they have a fabric that would be twice as bright with a smaller viewing angle. The brighter fabric would have the same physical properties (ie opaque and gray) as the fabric we have now. The sample of the rear projection fabric on plexi has the same light dispersion properties as the heavy gray screen but in a rigid application. The Holo Screen is the most transparent screen during the day. It disperses the light well at night and has a high light gain. It does not perform well when projecting on it during the day and it does not read very well from the inside at night. It could be used in a rigid application with plexi. It also has the disadvantage of being by far the most expensive and taking the longest to order (about 5 weeks).
I took some videos at night: Night1,Night2
and during the day:Day1,Day2
And here are some photos:
Last night we were able to do a test with actual rear projection fabric taped to the rear of the front window. It looked great. I took some video but they really don’t do justice to how much nicer it was. There is only one pane of glass with the fabric on it in all the shots. Usually it is easy to see, if not look for the blue tape holding it up.
Viewing from the front you can see that the film evens out the bright spots although the image looks a little dimmer over all. It is still bright enough to read 8 inch type from the road. You might also notice the bouncing off the back mullions is minimized.
The difference is much more apparent at steeper viewing angles. With the film you can see read the sign from the stoplight even during the day. At night it is more pronounced.
From the inside during the day you can see this “cheaper” fabric is actually quite opaque but it does show the projection decently even in near full light. At night in the hallway you can see that with the fabric we have the option of showing colors and lighter backgrounds that were not options before.
Outside the screens is more apparent when we use a large field of white but also our pedestrian audience should be able to read the signage much better.
There was still some concern about how opaque the fabric we tested was.
**Update**
I did some looking into a local manufacturer and found out 3M does make something that looks nice. In theory anyway.
The Vikuiti product line has rear projection screen material that looks pretty heavy duty but there is also a wide array of Light enhancing films but according to their online info it hasn’t been used for this type of application yet.
This week we got control of the lighting behind the projected signs on our expansion. The screen still looks splotchy but now it is not faded out on top. There is some crazy bounce back that is more noticable when the lights are dimmer. You can see from this movie the light bounces back noticably off the clear glass and again of the frosted glass giving us this rather interesting pattern on the back wall. I think that is something we are going to have to embrace as a quality not an unintended side effect. Also notice we thinner type makes these weird patterns on the mullions. Andrew mentioned the mullions were like a light show on their own.
Certain colors show up better than others due to the tinting on the glass. Looks like yellow and pink show up best but bright bright green looks pretty good too. Blues and photographic images look very weak and muddy (yes that last movie is an image of 1 Groveland projected on the new building).
You can see the type looks better but the weird bouncing we saw on the mullions is visible from the outside and the light from the chadeliers hanging inside interferes with the projectors making a new dead spot in the middle of the image.
I got back from my night time tests with the new sign on the front of the building a little while ago. Everyone was pretty down at first because while it was still light out they looked pretty horrible, the design treatments we tried didn’t mitigate the problem at all. I’m not even going to show you those videos it was splotchy and gross with giant hot spots in the middle. So we waited until it was dark and the sign filled out better. There were still hot spots but you could at least see the edges of the sign. I’m sure we can make a design that looks pretty and mysterious although since only very large type shows up it couldn’t have very much information on it.
The tips for any one else designing a big rear projection sign is to use a black background. Here is a movie with a dark background as compared to one with a white background
There were two good things that happened right at the end of the night. We were told the interior passageway would be darker than it was in these tests but we can’t turn them off yet because the electricians are still working. Also we tested the sign using a rear projection film taped up to the inside of the frosted glass. Even that rough test produces a sharper more even image. The contractors installing the projectors think they can get their hands on a film that will let a lot of light through during the day but diffuse our projection enough to see an image.
Well we are off to an inauspicious start with the signage project for the front of the new building. It seems that the sign is not showing up very well during the day time. This is partly due to the nature of projecting a sign onto frosted glass during the daylight and partly due to the fact that the glass in the windows is not optical frosted glass it is instead plain old acid etched frosted glass. The thing about optical frosted glass (like regular projection screens) is that is has some little reflective particles that help spread the light out evenly. When you don’t have that you tend to get big bright spots in the middle of your video where the projector is. You can take a look at this video to see what it looks like on a sunny day. If your having trouble seeing the image focus on the frosted glass three quarters over on the right side. Unfortunately the video should be playing on the entire frosted glass surface that you can see in this shot.
So thats is bad news. We are meeting tomorrow to discuss options and ideas to fix it. After that meeting we finally get to see the projection at night and i am mostly confident that it will look good when it is darker outside.
I remember Marek had something like this happen with the projectors in the table thats why there is a special coating on the back of the glass. Maybe he would have some ideas also. Conviently he is in town installing the Dialog Table for a few days.
