LC Series™ Brings Windows to Life at Lexus Showroom Opening

The event certainly drew in the best of the best. Sheiks, princesses, one of Japan’s most powerful corporate executives and Tim Riley, Video Designer from XL Video. They were all there to see the spectacular opening of the new Lexus showroom in Muscat, Oman. That is, everyone apart from Tim of course, whose job it was to make it spectacular.

Lexus is the luxurious sub brand of Toyota and as such, the opening had to reflect the pomp and panache of the cars within. The opening took place outside the new showrooms with grandstand seating for around 500 and the Lexus building as a backdrop.

Windows come to life
Running the full length of the showroom are eight meter high windows which allow the passers-by, or in this case the audience, to look into the floor and view the array of new, luxurious cars. But around dusk, this all changed when a large section of the windows came to life. They were lined with 72 Martin LC Series™ LED panels covering a total of 144 square meters - and the effect was awesome.

As the LC panels moved through colorful stages of intensity, beginning with images gently floating on glass, the cars inside the showroom slowly disappeared and the focus became the staged area outside.

Tim Riley comments
Tim talked about why he chose the LC Series LED panels. “I had been looking at several other LED products, but when I saw the LC 2140 at PLASA I was sold. It is very transparent when the intensity is down, and has a big coverage. Two square meters is great. In the video industry people are really looking for this.

“On top of the large coverage area, the units are quite light which makes shipping cheaper, which it in fact was.”

Another big advantage of using such light weight units is that they negate the use of a bulky truss to hang them. For the Lexus showroom opening where transparency was crucial, Tim and his team used long, thin flagpoles fixed to the floor, and then they hung the LC panels from these. This innovative rigging and clever cable management avoided any loose cables and meant that when viewed from outside, the units were nearly imperceptible.

Tim used a media server for playback of video and images through the LED panels and was impressed by the flawless images on the LC 2140’s.

“In terms of features, the brightness control of the LC units is really good and can be controlled simply with power. 100% gives you full intensity and a solid background, or you can just turn it down and it is clear.”

Once the screen was rigged, running and mapped, XL’s in-house LED tech Joe Maekin and LED crew Jake Robertson and Graham Sharpe calibrated it to perfection to complement a high-res screen also involved in the show.

After all was said and done, XL Video put on a stunning show with great visible layers and a big reveal. In fact you could say it was a show fit for a sheik, or a princess, or one of Japan’s most powerful…