Barco G100 projector brings former Niagara Parks power station to life

Thinkwell Studio Montreal uses 23 projectors Barco G100 to bring the visual and auditory experience to life 'Currents: Niágara’s Power Transformed’ from the Niagara Parks Power Station.

Las Niagara Falls They are a natural wonder located on the border between the United States and Canada, with parks on both sides of the Niagara River. On the Ontario side, the park has the world's largest collection of decommissioned hydroelectric plants.

One of these ancient plants, Niagara Parks Power Station, has been converted into an attraction where visitors enjoy a visual and auditory experience called Currents: Niágara’s Power Transformed.

This multimedia experience allows visitors to go back in time and visualize the distant geological history of the region, when the falls were first created at the end of the last ice age more than 12.000 years.

The audiovisual show, immersive and interactive, transports visitors to the modern era, where you can see how these plants transformed the raw energy of the falls into electrical energy, how industrialization and growth brought to the area.

Project realization

Niagara Parks Commission (Niágara Parks Commission) from ontario, the government agency charged with overseeing the park, selected a hydroelectric plant 18.592 square meters and 115 years old to convert it into a tourist place in the heart of the park.

As part of the project they proposed ideas to combine the building's heritage with a public attraction that would attract visitors both day and night.. They decided on an interactive multimedia show to tell the story of the falls and educate visitors about their importance in generating electricity..

The Parks Commission linked up with Thinkwell Studio Montréal, a design and production agency that creates immersive experiences, to create a nighttime experience that completely surrounds the visitor with sights and sounds as they move through the facility.

The designers had to devise a way to integrate the various visual components with the building's open architecture and the decommissioned power generation equipment that still occupied sections of the plant space..

Besides, the required hardware (lightning, projectors and wiring) would have to be discreet enough, flexible and reliable to allow continuous operation without attracting attention or interfering with the experience. Y, above all, the presentation team could not compromise the historical integrity of the heritage site.
Thinkwell has designed a system that uses 23 video projectors to bring a presentation to life 40 minutes with sharp images and sharp colors.

G100 boat

The projection technology chosen was Barco, specifically the model G100. This G100 series single-chip projector offers optimal performance, flexibility and reliability, with high brightness levels, both indoors and outdoors. Es compatible con HDMI 2.0 for richer colors and deeper blacks, delivering overall image quality that resists light bleed.

The G100 is versatile enough to project from short or long distances, with a reach ratio of 0,38 a 10,8. And you can do it in an orientation of 360 degrees, perfect for Thinkwell requirements.

The projector integrates cooling to withstand ambient operating temperatures of up to 50 °C. The G100's laser phosphor light source and advanced cooling design also provide more than 20.000 hours of operation without changing the lamp, saving considerable maintenance costs.

The software Projector Toolset Barco makes it easy to install and manage the G100 projector with an intuitive user interface. The software's blending and warping capabilities make it ideal for multi-channel, media-based attractions such as planetariums., houses, theaters, projection mappings or, in this case, the presentation of the Niagara Parks power station.

After 18 months of design and installation, Thinkwell and the Niagara Parks Commission launched their innovative show in September 2021.

“Barco had to convince us because it was a new technology, but once we saw the luminance levels of the G100 and its abilities to not only adapt to the space, but also to project beautiful images on 360 degrees, There was no doubt that Barco was the option”, explains Julien Roy, technical director of Thinkwell Studio Montreal.