A huge new video wall has taken place in the entrance lobby of 505 1st Avenue South, a new office building in downtown Seattle, USA. The 9ft high by 52 ft wide rear-projection wall has its content managed and delivered by six DLP projectors, each with its own PC workstation running a Dataton WATCHOUT solution to offer seamless edge-blending, overlapping, and meshing of images, all in complete synchronization. A seventh PC is used as a master production computer, running its own copy of WATCHOUT.

The video wall is part of a complete multimedia installation in the lobby of the building, designed by principal consultant Tracey Nash of ProAV Gear, and constructed and installed by CompView. The lobby was not designed with a video wall in mind but, after the building’s owner, Starbucks Coffee, decided not to occupy it but lease it floor-by-floor to tenants instead, the whole nature of the space altered.

“We had to get prospective tenants interested in the building and were looking for something that would grab peoples attention, explains Jay Philips, Director of Corporate Facilities for Starbucks. “We wanted a signature piece for the building. In Seattle, new buildings don’t have signature pieces outside of a fireplace or maybe a water feature. We wanted something interactive or media-related that could create a different look and feel in the lobby, without having to change lighting or decor. Some of my colleagues thought a video wall might be a bit too Vegas but I persuaded them otherwise!”

Local Seattle creative agency, Mind Opera was tasked with creating all the content for the video wall. They started with stop-motion movies of the building being constructed, then onto pre-programmed material such as Seattle city scenes in different seasons of the year.

The video wall has proved to be such a hit with tenants that Starbucks now considers it to be an asset of the facility in its own right, rather than merely a marketing tool.

“My original concept was that, once tenants began to occupy the building, the screen would do something like restart itself on the hour every hour, creating something new and cool to look at that employees would want to come down and check out”, says Jay Philips. “We had not done much else but come up with some simple sights and sounds from around Washington State things that people might remember the building by.

We never thought that our tenants would get so excited about using it for their own marketing and communications purposes to such an extent that they want to negotiate usage of the screen into their lease terms. We have one tenant that does voice-recognition software that is looking at how they might produce content, and another that wants to use the wall to mark their arrival in the building in October. Having made the original investment in the wall, we’re now seeing our tenants investing in it themselves.”

[Images: CompView and Gary Wilson Photography]