Colombia. Christie's HS Series 1DLP laser projectors are offering a spectacular immersive experience to visitors to La Selva, an educational geodesic dome designed to learn about and preserve the Colombian jungles. Located in the El Tesoro Business Park in Medellín (Colombia), it is a project co-produced by the park itself and the company Lonko Labs.
Forests represent 36.5% of Colombia's territory. The largest number of these ecosystems are in the Amazon and Chocó, two places where a large number of animal species, plants, fungi and other forms of life live, making Colombia the second most biodiverse country in the world.
With the aim of paying tribute to these territories and generating an educational and awareness experience in favor of their conservation, El Tesoro Business Park created La Selva, a sensory experience generated by a digital, realistic and immersive construction developed by Lonko Labs.
It is a dome of 13 meters in diameter and 8.5 meters high that includes a negative pressure system and that on the outside supports 1200 kilos of straw to resemble as much as possible a maloca or traditional jungle house.
Inside, six 13,500 lumen units of Christie's HS Series operating with warping and blending perform a 360-degree projection on an area of 265 square meters, with a total resolution of 3500 x 3500 pixels.
The projected contents, which were created especially for La Selva and supervised by scientific experts, include elements of flora and fauna with 3D animation that allow visitors to enter in a faithful way into the Colombian jungles, interacting with mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, insects and plants. The surround sound achieved with multiple audio channels generates a total immersive experience.
The choice of the Christie brand for the projectors came from the need to have reliable equipment that had operational capacity with a minimum of maintenance, according to Victor Abarzúa, founder and director of Lonko Labs. "They are machines that allow us to obtain excellent results and offer us total peace of mind, ensuring an impeccable execution of the project," says Abarzúa.
The director of Lonko Labs especially emphasizes the laser light source of the HS Series, its low power consumption versus excellent light output and the great image quality: "The color richness of its DLP chip, very close to the quality of a 3DLP, but with a smaller size, is excellent. It also has a contained weight that allows it to be easily manipulated by two people."
And he adds: "I would also highlight its ease of network connectivity for control, supervision and calibration functions, in addition to the receptivity in EDID Manager protocols and the good synchronism that this generates, without forgetting its great flexibility to work in any physical position".
Lonko Labs was in charge of different responsibilities of the project, including creative artistic direction, 3D modeling and animation, the infrastructure of the geodesic dome, audiovisual integration, and the 100% original music, which was created by a large team of musicians with traditional instruments recorded in the studio.
La Selva offers 12 daily performances, each lasting about 15 minutes, with a maximum of 60 people per performance seated in beach-type chairs, individual poufs and a large central pouf mainly for the little ones, all designed for the comfort of observing the sky. La Selva will be in the El Tesoro Business Park in Medellín for two months, but the idea is that the dome will be taken to other cities in the country.
"La Selva is a truly unique project in Colombia, with an unprecedented creative process in the country in which a multidisciplinary team of more than 100 people has worked under a rigorous conceptualization. It is ultimately an immersive experience with an unconventional staging that has been taken care of down to the smallest detail," concludes Victor Abarzúa.
