In order to turn its auditorium into a multi-purpose venue, and to improve the general visual experience, Dubai’s GEMS Modern Academy replaced their legacy projection system with a massive LED wall from Hikvision. The renovated auditorium has become a popular venue for students, staff, and the community.
Challenge
Turning the school auditorium into a multi-purpose performance venue
With the numerous approaches to entertainment available today, and with audiences’ surging demand for rich, high-quality content display and immersive sound and video. As a result, venues such as showrooms, studios, auditoriums, and lecture halls are dabbling in a host of new technologies and applications to achieve the ‘wow factor’ audiences are looking for.
GEMS Modern Academy is one of these venues. Offering Curriculum to children from kindergarten to grade 12, GEMS is one of the top ten schools in Dubai. Its large auditorium holds 500 seats for school events and can be rented out for private events on weekends. Originally, the auditorium had a large projection screen on the stage to display presentations, images and videos. However, every element in the environment could take away from the image quality, from sunlight coming in through windows to the whiteness of the screen, the distance from the projector, the age of the system, and more.
Ritesh Dhanak, Head of the IT team at GEMS Modern Academy said, “The projector system was not good enough with the ambient lighting. In order to create a better experience in our auditorium, and to pave the way for it to become a community hub, we need to do a complete upgrade to our live audio, stage lighting and visual display systems,” To achieve this, Mr. Dhanak worked with Almoe AV Systems, a renowned distributor and solutions provider of professional audio visual & IT products in the UAE. Almoe helped the school to upgrade the auditorium’s touch control systems, matrix switchers, stage lighting, and speaker systems. For the most crucial part of the solution – the visuals – they worked with Hikvision to install a new LED display.
The solution
A massive Hikvision LED wall and movable LED side-walls
LED displays offer many advantages, including flexibility and modularity. Therefore, the school decided to install a massive LED screen at a width of 12.48 meters, a height of 4.86 meters, and a pixel pitch of 2.5mm at the center of the auditorium stage. The massive LED wall is made up of nine pieces of P2.5 Fine Pixel Pitch LED Display Units (DSD4425FI-CAF). The wall delivers an outstanding color gamut and contrast ratio to create remarkably refined images.
For the setup, GEMS Modern Academy preferred to make the two sides of the screen removable to ensure flexibility on the stage, as well as to have multiple videos broadcasted on the screens simultaneously. Four smaller side-screens were designed to be 2 meters wide and 5 meters high, with a pixel pitch of 2.9mm. They were installed on the two sides of the massive center screen. Each side-wall was composed of four P2.9 Indoor Rental LED Displays (DS-D4429RI-CAF). The two side-screens are used as backdrops, and can be easily removed when they are not needed.
The LED walls are managed using Hikvision’s Video Wall Controller (DS-C10S-S11T), which supports up to 3840×2160 resolution at 30Hz from multiple signal sources (VGA, DVI, HDMI, SDI, YpbPr, DP and HDBaseT). This enables the school faculty to easily manage multiple video and audio inputs and outputs.
The benefits
Excellent visual experience for audiences makes the auditorium a popular venue for students, staff, and the community
Hikvision’s LED wall has vastly improved the visual performance of lectures and events held at the auditorium. With an extremely bright and clear image displayed, the screen loses none of its sharpness, color, or coherence, even when viewed at an angle or when the auditorium is brightly lit. “The LED wall provides high-quality visuals, and is perfect for our large auditorium,” said Mr. Dhanak, “Unlike with the old system, we don’t have to dim the lights in the auditorium during lectures, presentations, or live performance, and this allows students to take notes, remain more attentive and, for remote viewers joining via web conferencing, see the auditorium clearly.”
In the end, the video wall displays excellent visuals, adapts to ambient lighting conditions, and offers unique flexibility with the removable sidewalls. As a result, Hikvision’s LED display solution has turned the auditorium into a venue that fits all kinds of events. Since the LED screens have been installed, the school has hosted a large number of events at the auditorium, such as school lectures, stage plays, and musical performance. In addition, the venue has also been rented out for many private events such as public presentations and speeches.
Impressively, the venue has also been used to host a TED Talk, one of the most popular lecture platforms in the world. Mr. Dhanak concluded, “With a large multi-purpose auditorium providing such excellent visual experience to the audience, events at GEMS Modern Academy are now on a different level and our auditorium is a much sought after event space in the community.”
