Projection mapping: Creating the Mirage at Metropolis

by | 11 July 2018 7:45 am

By Diane Pereira

The ‘Mirage At Metropolis’ was a project specially developed in 2016 for British Columbia’s largest shopping mall, Metropolis at Metrotown. The four-storey complex in Burnaby, B.C., hosted a 360-degree audiovisual (AV) immersive experience in its main atrium, combining colourful, animated digital projection-mapped content with a mirrored floor and ceiling to create the illusion of infinity and greatly amplifying the visuals.

“Technology is increasingly being used in our daily lives,” says Judy Black, the mall’s marketing director. “We wanted to provide a fun and unique experience, incorporating both art and technology, for our customers. The Mirage was just that, an innovative and memorable experience that customers of all ages were able to enjoy.”

Combined efforts
For this project, Vancouver-based Go2 Productions, a video and projection mapping company, worked very closely with Bold Event Creative, the Burnaby-based design firm that came up with the original concept and then engineered and built the structure. As soon as Go2 became involved, they looked for ways to make the two-minute experience of walking through the space as immersive and distinctive as possible by developing digital projections that would add a range of multifaceted illusions.

Go2 was responsible for specifying the necessary technology for the installation, as well as for designing and producing the video content to be projected and the corresponding audio content to be played back to create a ‘soundscape.’ With each team focused on its specialties, the partnership was a good fit.

Keeping the mall’s broad customer demographics in mind, the concept was designed for all ages. It was important for the ambient content not to be too scary for younger visitors. As such, the three-dimensional (3-D) graphics included warm sunbursts and flowers.

Replicating the TARDIS
From the outside, Mirage was simply a 1.9-m² (20-sf) box, but when people walked in, they felt like it was bigger on the inside, thanks to a short journey through light, dark and colourful geometric illusions. The key to creating this experience was the feeling of expansiveness.

“I’m a fan of the TV series Doctor Who,” explains Go2 president and executive creative director Adrian Scott, “so I describe Mirage as being like the Time And Relative Dimension In Space (TARDIS) machine, which looks like an old police box on the outside but is enormous inside. We wanted people’s brains to be fooled into thinking Mirage is a lot bigger inside than out. And when customers are standing in the mall looking at the outside of the cube, we want them to wonder what is happening inside.”

There were a number of notable challenges, both creative and technical, that needed to be overcome with this project.

Creating an illusion
The main creative challenge, as mentioned before, was to design an experience that would be equally appealing to all ages, from the very young to the very old. To overcome any divisions between these age groups, Go2 focused on such universal concepts as colour, geometry and depth perception.

The experience starts out relatively simply, by displaying a grid of white dots on a black background on just one of the walls. At first, these dots calmly shrink and grow in synchronization with the audio track. Next, they compress into flat lines, which expand horizontally to fill the entire room with stripes.

As the stripes extend and meet each other on the opposite wall, all four walls appear to push outward, creating the illusion of the room growing larger. Within this newly perceived space, the projection-mapped content uses distance, geometric transformations, rotations, lighting and texture effects to increase the visitors’ sensation of standing in a much larger room.

Determining technical specifications

To achieve this sensation, Go2 installed four Optoma ultra-short-throw Digital Light Processing (DLP) projectors inside the room. Together, these projectors could create 360-degree visuals—but ensuring they could pull off the stunt successfully was a major technical challenge in itself.

The biggest difficulty was in determining the exact placement of each of the four projectors. In normal use, they would sit perpendicular to the intended projection surface, so they could throw an image up, perfectly square, no more than 0.9 m (3 ft) higher or lower than their installed position. For Mirage, however, the projectors needed to be installed as close to the ceiling as possible (so as not to be blocked by the standing visitors), yet also had to throw images to cover the wall from floor to ceiling.

Such a configuration was certainly not supported in the manufacturer’s specifications. To achieve it, Go2 first determined the perfect angle for ‘tipping’ the projectors was eight degrees. By positioning them with extreme precision, the installers created a highly acute trapezoid-shaped projection on each wall. The combination of these four projections was very tight in terms of total surface coverage, but it did manage to fully cover each wall as planned. Once this level of coverage was achieved, the video images were warped accordingly, so as to appear perfectly on each wall and seamlessly across them.

Once those particular hurdles were leaped, the rest of the project was fairly straightforward in technical terms.

“For a creative activation so big and impressive, I think it would surprise people to know how easy it is to run,” says Scott. “It starts, uploads images and shuts down automatically. It takes only one person to operate. You just push a green button and off it goes!”

Getting noticed
Within the first few days of opening, more than 1,000 people were passing through Mirage each day. By the end of the first week, the crowds were up to 1,200 per day and hundreds of tweets and posts were being uploaded to social media on an ongoing basis.

The social media integration was facilitated by the on-site installation of a webcam and an Apple iPad. The webcam took pictures of the attendees, which they could then sign up—via the iPad—to have e-mailed to them. Some visitors also shot video of their experience inside the room using their smartphones and posted the footage online, using mobile apps like Periscope and Facebook Live.

By the end of the summer, Mirage’s Facebook reach totalled 76,657 people. The hashtag #METMIRAGE was tweeted 3,079 times via Twitter and posted on Instagram, where it received 3,124 comments and 70,736 likes. Further, 109 videos were shared through social media.

This March, at the 2018 Digital Signage Expo (DSE) in Las Vegas, Nev., Mirage’s use of digital projection mapping earned a silver Apex Award in the immersive environments category.

Diane Pereira is marketing and communications manager for Vancouver-based Go2 Productions. For more information, contact her via e-mail at diane@go2productions.com.

Source URL: https://www.signmedia.ca/projection-mapping-creating-a-mirage-at-metropolis/

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