LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC CEREMONIES & LED Taxi

High on the list of technologies that delivered such a memorable and moving London 2012 opening ceremony were the ‘pixels’ that turned the Olympic Stadium seating into a giant video screen.We were directly brought in by TAIT Technologies to work on this with their direction. We used 37 Ai Media Servers and 4 Sapphire-Midi Controllers to control the video on the 70,500 pixel tablets situated within the audience seating, as well as to control all LED & projection screens throughout the stadium. The ‘landscape screen’ is recognised by the Guinness World Book of Records as the ‘World’s Largest LED Screen‘.

Immersive had a long-standing ambition of representing UK design in the 2012 Olympic games. We had always liked the idea of creating an ‘immersive’ video screen and soon were approached by the only company in the world who could manufacture such a dream – Tait Technologies. They had technically researched such an idea and already developed the installation into the form of tablet batons that each had 9 LED pixels in a 3×3 array. Each seat was equipped a tablet. All 70,500 of them were manufactured by Tait Technologies. The tablets measure 134mm square, and the pixel pitch is 50mm. Each pixel is individually programmable. The viewing angles are 180º both horizontally and vertically.

We supplied bespoke templates that made animating on the warped screen possible to the animation teams working for ceremony director, Danny Boyle. We controlled all of the LED batons and mapped all content to the unique fixtures with our custom-made media server, Ai, which was the main media server used by the London 2012 ceremonies.

“We chose Ai because of Avolites’ substantial and long history in the field of entertainment; and quite simply this is one of the only server systems that can handle mapping on such huge scale. The Olympics was a one-shot event – it had to be perfect – and the strength of the company reputation is reassuring to all those involved. Managing this volume of mapping is easy with the Ai software.”
– Frederic Opsomer, CEO of Tait Technologies

We used 37 Ai Media Servers and 4 Sapphire-Midi Controllers, all were operated live by Immersive and Avolites Media technical staff. We controlled Installations including: 70,000 Audience LED Pixels, x5 Spice Girls London Taxis, x4 Freddy Mercury moving Projection Screens, x4 Stadium 30m Audience LED Screens, Coldplay Live Stage projection plus all Stadium IMAG screens. For the closing ceremony dance party highly anticipated Spice Girl’s reunion preformance, 5 of London’s famous Black Taxi’s were fitted on the exterior with LED by Tait and equipped on the interior with five mobile Ai servers to control the videos. Special thanks to Dave Green, Trey Harrison, Mark Calvert, JB Toby, and Martin Harvey.

Source: immersive.international