Dubai Frame: projection, sound, lighting and show control for a 150-metre landmark

The Dubai Frame stands 150 metres high and 93 metres wide in Zabeel Park, with old Dubai to the north and the new city to the south. Dubai Municipality built it as a landmark and a visitor experience, and MTE Studios designed that experience to tell the city's story in three parts: past, present and future.

Visitors start in a gallery of old Dubai, take the lift 48 floors to a glass-floored bridge across the top of the frame, and come back down through a vortex tunnel into a panorama of Dubai 50 years from now. The Frame opened to the public on 1 January 2018.

Each part of the story happens in a very different kind of space, and each asks something different of the technology.

The Old Dubai gallery is a dark walk-through of set-works. Projection, holographic effects, sound and even scent have to feel like a street and a souk, not a row of screens. The Sky Deck is a glass bridge 150 metres up, in full daylight, where every display competes with the sun and with the view. And in the Future Dubai gallery, visitors stand inside a curved 106 m² screen that fourteen projectors have to turn into one seamless picture.

All of it had to run as a single show, every day, for a steady flow of visitors, and be handed over to a team that runs a public attraction, not a control room.

We worked for MTE Studios as the AV integrator, and alongside Bad Weather Productions on the lighting design, from design development, while the design was still open, through commissioning and handover.

• Projection: more than 40 Christie projectors across the galleries, from the environmental projection in Old Dubai to the Future Dubai panorama, where fourteen Christie GS Series laser-phosphor projectors blend into a single image on the curved screen.
• Media playback: more than ten Christie Pandoras Box media servers play, warp and blend the content, so MTE's six-minute 3D film fills the curved screen without visible seams.
• Audio and show control: a Q-SYS system carries the sound for every gallery and runs the show, so the galleries start up and shut down on a schedule, without anyone at a control desk.
• Lighting: ACME fixtures, to Bad Weather Productions' lighting design, light the set-works of Old Dubai.
• The Sky Deck: four large LED prisms that show 3D animations beside the windows, and the touch-glass beacons visitors swipe to make their own art on them.
• Interactives: the Moments Wall of visitors' photos, the motion-detection game wall, and the Kinect cameras for virtual selfies.
• The vortex tunnel: the light effects that carry visitors from the lift into the future.
• Displays: the building's other screens and touch screens.
• Infrastructure: the AV network that links the projectors, media servers and Q-SYS, and the equipment racks and cabling behind them.

The Dubai Frame opened to the public on 1 January 2018, with the experience telling the city's story from its first day. We trained the Frame's operators and handed over full documentation of the system, so the team could run it themselves.