The Rundle Lantern concept proposed by Fusion’s principal, Damien Mair, involved wrapping a low resolution video screen around a rather unattractive eight-storey council car park on the corner opposite the Rundle Mall. The intention was emphatically not to display anything as mundane as football, motor racing, advertising, news or music videos. According to Mair: “The vision for the Lantern was to create an experience that would capture the imagination of the city and add beauty to people’s lives.” Fusion’s proposal included the design, provision and programming of material for the screen that would include seasonal and event-related theming and incorporate creative input from the arts community.
The final design consisted of 748 anodised aluminium panels, arranged in 22 rows and 34 columns. Each 1.4sqm panel is carefully angled to provide visual continuity from street level, yet retain 50% of the airflow from the original open-wall design. The images are created on the screen by illuminating each panel from light sources hidden in the top of the panel below it. Realising that LEDs were probably the only type of light source that could provide the colour range, longevity and energy efficiency required for the screen, Fusion went looking around the world for a company that could not only provide the necessary high-output LEDs, but also the control technology to drive them as part of a large screen system.
The Space Cannon proposal (that was ultimately implemented on the project), was to light each of the 714 active panels with a pair of independently controlled, custom-built Bisquit LED luminaries, resulting in a display with 1428 addressable ‘pixels’. The Rundle Lantern version of the Bisquit are IP66- rated exterior fixtures, containing 12 high-efficiency LED sources (4 x red, 4 x green and 4 x blue), configured for full-spectrum RGB colour mixing via the DMX512A control protocol, and remotely addressable via the Remote Device Management (RDM) protocol. The Space Cannon package also included the design, commissioning and programming of a suitable data distribution, control and programming system.
Source: AV Magazine