Kinetic Module equips the immersive installation of the Artexplorer museum ship

In the main gallery, an immersive tunnel has been installed consisting of two LED walls of Leyard of 16×3 metros. Curved modules rise to the base of the mast. The installation is completed with two LED screens 4 square meters, located at the entrance and exit. To feed the 50 million pixels of the tunnel the Modulo Kinetic media server has been used.

In the spring of 2024, the Art Explora Foundation launched its traveling festival across seas and oceans with Artexplorer, the world's first museum ship. Akumendo y Arscenic They joined forces for this project. A sistema audiovisual latest generation, with a Immersive Led tunnel and the servidor multimedia Modulo Kinetic of Moson.

Created by the French businessman and philanthropist Frédéric Jousset, The Art Explora Foundation aims to make art and culture accessible to all types of audiences, placing mobility and digital technology at the center of its activities.

The foundation's latest project is the Art Explora traveling festival and its catamaran named Artexplorer.. Started ago 4 years, It is the first museum ship in the world. The catamaran 47 meters long and its sails 55 meters were built at the Perini Navi shipyard in Italy.

Since the spring of 2024 until autumn 2026, the Art Explora festival and its museum ship plan to visit fifteen countries in the Mediterranean Sea.

Akumendo, computer integration specialist on board yachts, and Arscenique, audiovisual service provider, have come together to develop a joint response to the project requirements.

One of the main challenges was to create a immersive space that could host digital exhibitions for about forty people on the main deck of the ship. It also had to be detachable so that Artexplorer could be used as a cruise ship outside of festival periods..

“In the specifications of the museum part, The idea was to create a large immersive room inside the main deck, of some 19 meters long by 6 meters wide. Early designs included video projectors, But we soon realized that it was going to be complicated”, explains Guy Butterati, co-founder of Akumendo.

Emmanuel Ducros, president of Arscénique, duck: “We have very low ceiling height, so even with ultra short throw models, About thirty video projectors would have been needed in a small space, with up to 40 people living the experience causing projected shadows”.

Given the difficulty of installing a projection system on board the catamaran, Akumendo and Arscénique turned to Led technology and the manufacturer Leyard to design a custom Led structure. “It was not the client's initial request, but in addition to the video projection studio, “We carried out a study with an LED tunnel”, explains Ducros.

An immersive experience

The Led proposal by Akumendo and Arscénique was finally chosen to equip the museum ship.

The visit experience takes place in three stages. Visitors access the upper deck of the Artexplorer, where they are equipped with headphones RSF Confident con audio binaural.

For about ten minutes, Visitors experience a sound odyssey around the Mediterranean designed by the IRCAM, the french institute for musical and acoustic research and coordination. The tour continues on the aft deck, where a documentary is projected on a 3-inch LED wall×2 metros.

Finally, the public enters the heart of the main deck and accesses the immersive gallery. Over there, experience the digital exhibition'Present’, designed with the collaboration of Louvre Museum and created by Julien Abril and his team of Graphics eMotion.

An immersive Led tunnel has been installed in the main gallery. The structure, custom made and removable, is the fruit of the close collaboration between Akumendo, The Leyard’s Arscénique. “We had to combine the limitations of the navigation environment with those of an event-type system. The system was designed as for a tour”, afirma Guy Butterati.

The immersive tunnel is made up of two walls of 16 meters long and 3 meters high. Los curved led modules They rise to the base of the mast. The installation is completed with two LED walls of 2×2 metros, located at the entrance and exit of the tunnel. The gallery can accommodate about forty visitors. With the public located about 1,80 meters of screens, All LED elements have a pixel of 1,5 to ensure the best viewing experience.

To feed the 50 million pixels of the Led tunnel, Akumendo and Arscénique used Modulo Kinetic media server from Modulo Pi. The kit consists of a workstation Modulo Kinetic Designer and three servers Modulo Kinetic V-Node equipped with 4 4K outputs and 4 TB of storage. The racks containing the media servers are located to the port and starboard sides of the immersive installation to accommodate the limited space.

The servers are used to play the show 12 minutes to 60 fps designed for the Led tunnel, as well as the documentary shown on the ship's aft deck. The Kinetic Module also controls the 8 multichannel speakers Genelec distributed throughout the immersive room.

One of the V-Node servers has been equipped with a Dante virtual sound card to communicate with networked speakers, thus reducing the amount of wiring on board the ship.

The show control functions of the Modulo Pi multimedia server have also been used. The UI Designer integrated into the Kinetic Module has made it possible to create custom panels to control the launch of video shows and send the start of the audio show played through the binaural headphones. Besides, A maintenance panel has been specially designed to provide feedback from the audiovisual system in real time.

Thanks to the Kinetic Panel companion app, Control panels created on the media server can be accessed from a tablet. Guy Butterati talks about a specific panel for daily operations. “The technical information, such as temperature or electricity consumption, It is available in the form of a dashboard for the operations manager, that you can access it from your own iPad”.

Guy Butterati comments on Kinetic Module: “The system has shown us two things: it's very open, very versatile and also very reliable in its operational phase”.

Currently used for media playback and show control, The system could evolve towards more advanced applications using the interactive features of Modulo Kinetic. “Art Explora is a forward-thinking foundation. We didn't want a simple player. Con Modulo Kinetic, we know that we are prepared for the future and that we will be able to respond to all possible situations in the future”, concludes Guy Butterati.

The Art Explora festival and its museum ship have already stopped in La Valette (Malta), Venice (Italia) and Marseille (France). The next stop will be Tangier, in Morocco, of the 20 al 29 September.