Starbucks Markets Seattle Office Space It Owns Using Vast Projection Wall In Lobby
November 17, 2017 by Dave Haynes
There is so much fine pitch LED stuff going in as video walls these days that it is easy to forget about other ways of doing a big digital canvas, like projection.
This is a project in Seattle in a building owned by Starbuck’s – but it is NOT the head office, just commercial property the coffee giant owns.
Starbucks initially built-out the office building at 505 1st Avenue South for their own use, then changed plans as a result of the recession, says a Diversified case study on the project. “We had to get prospective tenants interested in the building and were looking for something that would grab people’s attention,” explains Jay Philips, Director of Corporate Facilities for Starbucks. “We wanted a signature piece for the building.”
The answer was 9 foot high by 52 foot wide video wall done in the lobby using edge-blended NEC projectors and a system of mirrors.
For AV nerds:
Constructed and installed in collaboration with Lease Crutcher Lewis (general contractor) and Gunsul, Clark, Iverson (architect), the finished video wall measures 9-feet high by fully 52-feet wide, and is made up of four unframed Da-Lite Da-Plex rear-projection screens with a DA-100WA wide-angle coating. Content is delivered by six NEC 6,200-lumen XGA DLP projectors, housed in Da-Lite thru-wall, single-mirror rear-projection modules.
The six projected images are served content, seamlessly edge-blended together and synchronized by Dataton Watchout software residing on HP Z400 workstation computers with nVidia Quadro FX1800 graphics cards – one workstation per projector, with a seventh acting as the master production computer.
The set-up also has audio.
Very nice. Projection can be a big challenge in a lot of building lobbies because of ambient light, particularly in lobbies with a lot of windows. But in a building like this, with the wall a little deeper in and a shallow ceiling, it works!
Sick!
Very nice. Since high output projectors are now available with light sources that do NOT cost a day 2 fortune, projection IS a viable option, in the right places.
An office building has the same audience each and every day. A linear video like this is very pretty on day one, but few projects budget for redoing videos regularly. IMHO dynamic or reactive content would make this installation so much more compelling as the content would always change. No need to make new videos.