Media Studies College Makes Giant Trapezoidal LED Display Lobby Centerpiece

December 6, 2017 by Dave Haynes

This is the lobby of the new home for the Creative Media Industries Institute (CMII) on the campus of Georgia State University, with the focal point a 34-foot wide trapezoidal curved LED display.

The downtown Atlanta building is home to the university’s digital media and film industries studies.

“Our new Creative Media Industries Institute building is now, quite literally, a beacon of creativity that enables our students to experiment and prepare for careers in the rapidly changing fields of media and technology,” says Elizabeth Strickler, CMII Director of Media Entrepreneurship and Innovation. “It’s really important to differentiate our program, to show our interactive capability and technological prowess. When we moved forward with the design of a new building, we knew we had an opportunity to provide our students and the larger community that traverses Woodruff Park every day with something novel and exciting. Building on the success of our original “Window Project” at the old building, in which we exhibited artists’ digital creations in large format by projecting them onto frosted windows, we wanted to create a larger installation space that featured technology that was better, brighter and more advanced than projection technology.”

Strickler says she told the building’s architects she wanted the centerpiece of the new lobby to be a giant interactive media display, just like The Window Project, but more advanced. “One of the main problems was that projection is very hard to use in daylight situations – something that NanoLumens technology solved – and also that working with six projectors to display a single image was incredibly complicated. We knew a single massive display would be the answer.”

Throughout talks with the architects, says a press release, the idea of utilizing a curved surface kept popping up. In the end, the decision was made to build a curved wall in the building’s main entrance, which has 20-foot ceilings and wall-to-wall windows, making it a highly visible location for thousands of daily passersby.

Not content to simply have a massive curved HD display, they also agreed that a standard 16:9 rectangle was uninspiring. Luckily there are no limits to the creativity and engineering capability of NanoLumens, and the final order became a 34” wide curved trapezoid, with the left and right ends standing 10’ and 7’ tall, respectively, resulting in a gentle sloping bottom for the display. Utilizing a 3mm pixel pitch, the display has a truly unique pixel count and display ratio that challenges students to step out of their comfort zone and create digital media projects specifically for this display.

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