Scalable Display projects the history of Céide Fields in 360º

The visitor center of Fields Drive offers an immersive experience with technology Scalable Display for visitors to view the complex and extensive remains of the world's oldest fields and stone walls.

He Neolithic site of Céide Fields, in county mayo (Ireland), which according to historians dates back to about 6.000 years, They are covered by a natural peat bog, with unique vegetation and fauna, which houses an area of fields, housing areas and megalithic tombs that constitute the largest Stone Age monument of the world.

just a year ago, The Irish Government inaugurated a state-of-the-art visitor experience center in Céide Fields, located in front of some spectacular rock formations and with a large observation platform on the edge of the cliff of 110 meters high, who has now completed a project with immersive technology to show its discovery and archaeological history.

The Irish company Rockbrook Audio Visual was selected to design and apply personalized audiovisual technologies, creative and interactive to this center, the result of which has been the creation of the first immersive 360º fixed installation experience in a visitor center in this country.

This is what he points out Jon Hughes, director gerente de Rockbrook Engineering: “Our goal was to create an immersive experience that would allow you to travel through time.”, through computer generated image animations (CGI), to what we believe was the life of the settlers ago 6.000 years. Although this type of 360º experiences is not something innovative by current standards, “Building one in such a small space and with an incredibly complex room shape required a lot of detailed engineering and a compelling software solution to create the mix.”.

Faced with space challenges, Hughes emphasizes that “based on our team's extensive experience in creating combined displays, we knew there was only one viable option: Scalable Displays Technologies. At first we spoke with James Pietsch, your global account director, who went out of his way to help us and made the solution available to us, for which we are very grateful”.

The technological integration at the Céide Fields center had to adapt to a very complex room design, since wall is located at a different angle, some of them with a concave and horseshoe shape, like a pentagon and with each side a different length.

“It was a very complicated space and it could have prohibited us from doing what we physically wanted,” Hughes recalls.. To complicate it even more, Placing the projectors was an incredible challenge. We had to ensure that visitors to the space did not interrupt the projection beams as they moved around the room, which required placing some of them at acute angles”.

The space uses a total of eighteen projectors to cover all surfaces. The software of Scalable automates the calibration process and simplifies mixing of various teams, “And we can guarantee optimal recalibration on a regular basis to provide perfect blends,” he says.. Simplifies the maintenance perspective for this specific application, besides that . can work with multiple rendering clients, which allows us to incorporate various types of content”.

The content shown is composed entirely of CGI animations, that run at a 11,520 resolution×2.100 pixels, of the current environment and landscape of Céide Fields. It begins with a high-speed flyover from the sea to the cliffs, and the landscape rewinds thousands of years until the timeline shows 6.000 years BC, with scenes that represent life at that time.

The content ends with the landscape evolving into the modern era, where a man with a group of children hammers long bars into the ground in search of submerged walls, As the voyage of discovery continues to this day.

Céide Fields is not a typical archaeological monument or visitor center, but “the most extensive Stone Age monument in the world,” the organization emphasizes., which has been a success at all levels, highlighting its story through captivating content displayed with cutting-edge technology”.

In this sense, Hughes emphasizes that in addition to the precision of Scalable's software, "its team is the real selling point that is not known when researching a product. At the end of the day, Projects are made by people rather than software or technology. It's been a long time since I've worked with a team like yours., who was involved in the project and adapted to its needs. We work in different time zones with a complex remote access infrastructure. However, “We made it work.”.