The AD Blog

a stream of all things Acoustic Dimensions

Houston Astros unveil new display board..."El Grande"

Acoustic Dimensions completed commissioning of the new large screen video displays at Minute Maid park this week.  The new board—dubbed El Grande—is the among the largest video boards in the Major Leagues to feature a 1080i display format. The scoreboard is 54 feet high and 124 feet wide.

As part of the $13 million in upgrades, a new secondary LED HD video board -- dubbed El Nino -- was installed in left field. Both boards are made by Daktronics. The ribbon boards are above the Club Level, running from foul pole to foul pole and the outfield mezzanine area.

To support the new boards the control room was moved to a new location and upgraded to a 1080i HD system with 4 Sony manned cameras and 5 Canon PTZ cameras to cover every seat in the facility. Astros broadcaster Jim Deshaies termed the new master control "the ultimate man cave."

If you happen to be near Houston and would like to experience the upgrades for yourself, the Astros host the Florida Marlins on April 8th.

 

Acoustic Dimensions has a new visual tool to facilitate discussions on row spacing

For design teams, one of the most difficult things is describing spatial concepts in a way that clients can make decisions.  Frequently when working on the early concept development of an auditorium, clients ask about the differences in row spacing. Row spacing isn’t a simple issue since it has such a dramatic impact on the footprint of the auditorium.  Too narrow, and the audience won’t be comfortable.  Too wide, and you lose the intimacy of the space.  And, there is no simple formula.  The selection is completely dependent on the context.

Dan Schoedel—one of our ideation specialists—developed a tool to be able to illustrate the perceptual differences in row-to-row spacing for auditoriums and the difference in use of theatre seats and pews for houses of worship.  It is not an engineering tool and doesn't describe some of the important design elements such as variations in seat envelope, length of rows based on spacing, etc. but it is a helpful visualization tool to facilitate the discussion between designers and clients.

We share many of our in-house tools at acousticdimensions.com.  Check out the new row-to-row tool.

Row2rowtool

Miami's New World Center is the first hall designed for a digital world

New_worldcenter_performancehal

Architect, Frank Gehry is legendary for the curved surfaces and non-standard construction methodologies that characterize his work.  Acoustic Dimensions teamed with Gehry Partners on the New World Center in Miami.  One of the key design objectives of the new 756-seat hall is to immerse the audience in the experience of the music.  To accomplish this, the room not only immerses the audience audibly, but the room itself becomes an extension of the music visually.

As you might imagine, there is an art to designing video projection in a Gehry building.  None of the video projection screens are linear.  Consider what happens if you aim a video projector at a column or other curved surface.  The image distorts.  Part of our work was engineering a solution using digital image correction in a multichannel video server for each of the five main projection surfaces.  

Everything about the building bends the rules.   It is designed to reach beyond its own walls.  From the video art and live concerts  projected in high definition onto the large exterior wall to crowds in the park to the Internet 2 systems designed to support real-time collaborations between musicians in Miami Beach and anyplace else in the world, New World Symphony is the first concert hall to think like a digital world thinks--without regard to boundaries and geography.

Acoustic Dimensions provided the design of the projection systems for the interior and exterior, the audio systems and the Internet2 infrastructure.