LED Mainstreamed: New Tribal Community Center In Wisconsin Has 13 Big LED Displays
March 3, 2022 by Dave Haynes
A deployment of screens at a community center in upstate Wisconsin won’t set any pulses racing for what was done or what’s on the screens, but it is interesting in terms of the scale of the job and the owners.
The Forest County Potawatomi Native American band Indian opened an ambitious community center in late 2021 that includes a network of 13 indoor LED video screens around the 105,000-square-foot complex, which is a hub for cultural education, recreation, athletic training, competition, wellness, and social events.
Digital signage in community centers has tended to involve flat panel displays on walls and hanging from ceilings. If there was an LED screen, it was the ONE screen. This place has 13. Community centers also don’t tend to have much in the way of budgets, which is why you sometimes see digital OOH ad networks in them. In this case, the Potawatomi tribe has a casino in Milwaukee.
The screens are all from SNA Displays and were deployed by Camera Corner Connecting Point (CCCP),an AV integrator.
“From the beginning of this project, there were four main goals,” says Scott Tomashek, senior vice president of AV strategy at Camera Corner. “Deliver cutting-edge display technology, integrate flexible AV solutions, make the entire system easy to operate for community center users, and most of all, incorporate everything into the facility’s existing aesthetic rather than detracting from it. Our teams have done a great job in accomplishing those goals.”
The building’s design was informed by the Forest County Potawatomi culture, from the two levels that follow the natural grade to lessen environmental impact to the floor plan inspired by the form of an eagle in flight.
Among its wide array of features, the community center houses an impressive 20,000 square-foot wood court gymnasium, 20,000 square-foot fieldhouse with synthetic field turf, and 8,000 square-foot pool. The fieldhouse serves as a training and competition venue for field sports such as lacrosse, with seating for up to 1500 spectators, and as a central venue for tribal events. The new LED screens are used primarily as scoreboards and to share information with visitors.
The eye-catcher among the displays is a 2.9mm center-hung display that’s akin to a chandelier. It has two main digital signage elements, an outward-facing, 360-degree ring display and a circular screen that faces down toward the field. There’s another one in the gym, added after tribal leaders saw the first one installed.
The common areas have three wall-mounted 2.5mm interior displays, there are two more like it in the pool facility.
Peerless-AV engineered all mounting systems for the wall-mounted displays on campus, and Polar Focus provided design and engineering services for the intricate mounting structure needed to hang the video circles in the fieldhouse and gymnasium. Because the venue’s roof structure slanted upward from the center of the room and also from front to back, says PR, a unique solution was required to suspend the large center-hung video display systems.
Yet another example of how direct view LED is now a mainstream product.
I am a little puzzled by the presentations on the screens, which seem to have IP addresses in the bottom left in what at least looks like a browser. Why wouldn’t the software set these to full-screen?
Mind boggling how the AV industry doesnt seem to understand Form vs content The displays festoooned around the place showing utterly unreadable page content and sold on debunked CPMs GRPS Utter garbage