Twenty-five cameras, nine servers, 70 projectors and a lot of video-mapping knowhow are providing a 360° view of the art of Vincent Van Gogh in Ho Chi Minh City.
A team from VIOSO used the company’s camera-based auto-alignment technology to design and calibrate the multi-projector set-up at the heart of the first large-scale immersive art exhibition in Vietnam.
Staged in a 3,800 sq metre indoor/outdoor exhibition space at the Gigamall shopping centre, the Van Gogh Art Lighting Experience leverages AV technologies including projection mapping, virtual reality and 3D audio to showcase more than 900 of Van Gogh’s works.
The highlight of the exhibition is the Vincent’s Soul installation, which utilises 70 projectors – calibrated using VIOSO 6 software and dozens of calibration cameras – to create an immersive room with artworks mapped across 360° on the walls and floor.
In the Vincent’s Land area, the VIOSO team has helped to project Van Gogh’s works on to a 3D sculpture of the man himself – the first time a statue has been projection mapped in Vietnam.
VIOSO’s senior AV project manager, Etienne Servant, says the client brief was straightforward: “Here are the rooms. I want to put video content everywhere. How should we proceed?”
He adds: “I handled the planning and design of the installation, including the layout of the projectors and cameras, media servers and signal distribution, and provided the technical lay-outs to the exhibition for the installation.
“We then had to calibrate the projectors to achieve a seamless, perfectly warped and blended image stretching out across the full space and transferring knowledge to the client.”
To create the desired atmosphere in Vincent’s Soul and Vincent’s Land required 25 calibration cameras, which Servant combined with VIOSO 6 auto-calibration software. A compound of nine hardware VIOSO media servers running PIXERA handled content playback.
Although the Van Gogh Art Lighting Experience was seven years in the making, the technical team had just two months to complete the installation, in order to ensure the exhibition opened on 9 December.
Mia Nguyen, chief executive of First ITC, VIOSO’s partner on the project, says: “The timing was really short, as we had to open before Christmas to give the opportunity for everyone to come during the holidays. We started the technical integration in October – that’s Vietnamese efficiency.”
For Van Gogh fan Nguyen, the projection technology underpinning the Van Gogh Art Lighting Experience is what sets it apart from previous art exhibitions held in Vietnam.
“You can really immerse visitors into the universe of Van Gogh – it helps people to see how deep the paintings are,” she says. “Van Gogh is my passion, and seeing his paintings brought to life with the immersive environment created by VIOSO is a truly unique experience.”