Amptown System Company (ASC) has designed and installed a wide-ranging show control system aboard the Royal Caribbean International’s Anthem of the Seas, which set off on her maiden voyage down the coast of Western Europe on 22 April.
The system is located in the Two70° entertainment venue in the ship’s stern, named because of the 270° panoramic views of the ocean. The project was presented to ASC by the Royal Caribbean International shipping company and Meyer Werft, the dockyards in Papenburg, in the summer of 2012. The brief specified a complete interconnection and media-technology-related furnishing of the 40 entertainment centres of the new Quantum class cruise ships, which at 348m long and 41m wide, are among the largest in the world.
The Anthem of the Seas is home to six RoboScreens in the Two70°, made possible by Sebastian Kirsch, ASC project engineer for visual systems, using projections and controlling the image content on the floor-to-ceiling window surfaces. Before the show starts, the sun shields that serve as the projection surfaces are rolled down to cover the windows. With the help of this rolling screen system, known as ‘Vistarama’, 18 Panasonic projectors create scene designs on this innovative background.
The slope, curvature and surface textures of the Vistarama projection surfaces require the image content for the projections to be geometrically adapted.
“The result is a projection with a total resolution of 12,480 x 2,280 pixels and a projection size of 36 x 6 metres. For this purpose, we have used the Pandora’s Box media server and the Widget Designer show control software from coolux media systems,” explained Kirsch. “Pandora’s Box provides the perfect tools for adjusting the image content in three dimensions in real time. Despite an extremely steep projection angle and the short distance between the window façade and the projectors, this so-called ´warping´ process makes it seem like a single projector is projecting on a flat cinema screen.”
