International. RealMotion contributed its expertise to the launch of the world's first guitar-shaped hotel, the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.
Powered by a single RealMotion 4 Karat Gold Series server, the entire $1.5 billion, 400-foot-tall hotel façade is now one of the world's most unique digital sculptures, capable of featuring a multitude of dazzling visual effects and presentations using 2.3 million LED lights, video mapping and lasers: a project that was managed, directed, designed and installed by Boston-based custom manufacturer DCL (Design Communications LTD).
"The front façade of the hotel is both a media system and a dynamic sculpture," said Geoffrey Platt, Director of RealMotion. "Aligned with LED products and power systems provided by SACO, the front will serve as a display and stage for daily music displays. The shows will be a testament to how music has been instrumental in defining Hard Rock hotels, restaurants and entertainment properties around the world."
At the hotel's recent grand opening celebration, the capabilities of its LED façade were fully showcased, with generative and sound-reactive content created by Float4 delivering hours of vibrant visuals unlike any other display system in the world. The event presented a great revelation of what the guitar can do, establishing the guitar as the icon of static architecture.
As the atmosphere of the crowd built up over the afternoon, the official GUITAR SMASH experience ushered in a custom drum sequence, prompting bold guitar activation. The show then traveled through different decades, musical styles, and energies, featuring audio dynamics, intricate line compositions, cascades of light and cascading energy as transitions, and a full 3D guitar effect, with lasers extending into the sky to represent guitar strings. . Managing all this content and assigning pixels for 2.3 million individual LEDs put the RealMotion server to the test.
"The 4 Karat server plays a very important role in the technical management of the program itself," said Geoff Platt, Director of RealMotion. "We used ISAAC, an integrated automation programming and control platform created by Smart Monkeys, to develop a system for ingesting content on 4 Karat's server to manage and synchronize the show's millions of content elements. RealMotion's reliability ensures that Guitar Hotel shows are performed on a long-term basis. What DCL has put together is a great feat in digital signage, architecture and entertainment. We couldn't be prouder to have participated in this project and know that a 4 Karat RealMotion server can manage a show like this."
The façade has five central elements that can be used for specific effects. The front and back are the main sections in which dynamic video can be assigned to dynamic content. The line outline of the edges of the guitar shape, and the content plays with this aspect by hiding and revealing the contours of the guitar. The sides enhance the illusion of depth for visual effects, while the strings, which use lasers instead of LEDs, are used to display vertical movements and effects such as fonts, chord strumming, and string beats. Finally, The Spandrel Glass section is ideal for expanding face and body content to create the illusion of another level of content.
While the grand opening was indeed a great celebration, the full goal of this project was to enable a long-term digital sculpture installation that can showcase new content and themes as desired by the owners.
RealMotion took special care to build the content system in such a way that Hard Rock could make relatively quick adjustments that might otherwise take hours of video processing to complete. To achieve this, RealMotion used the sequence of images instead of video, so any changes would only require replacing or editing images within the sequence, eliminating the need for a new video file to be rendered.
Under DCL's direction, Float4 also developed two additional pieces of content. The "Sunset Ceremony" sets a festive tone for each night with visual images of a scenic sunset and a guitar spirit with reactive audio elements. The piece "Smooth" is a tribute to the end of the era of classic rock in its transition to contemporary music, based on the collaboration of Matchbox Twenty frontman Rob Thomas and Latin rock band Santana, and includes psychedelic artwork, a silhouette of a Latin dancer, patterns of "electric power" and "festive", and creative transitions like a river of light and congregational simulations. Ambient content plays when none of the main shows are scheduled, so there's always something to watch.
This is the video of the solution in operation
The Seminole Hard Rock Guitar Hotel & Casino from DCL on Vimeo.
