Avolites brings its media server to the heart of Rio in Las Vegas

The server Avolites is used to map, control and program more than 5 kilometers and 351.032 pixels, In addition, the X-Bar solution 25 mm Clear Led is responsible for wrapping the buildings in 360 degrees.

And Avolites Ai multimedia server is located at the heart of the spectacular lighting installation that envelops the two towers of the famous Rio de Las Vegas hotel and casino.

This server is used to map, control and program more than 5 kilometers and 351.032 'lighting possibilities' pixels. Designed by creative team of Chris Kuroda y Andrew Gif Giffin, use the solution X-Bar 25 mm de Clear Led to wrap the buildings in 360 degrees.

Recognized for their work as lighting designers for live music and entertainment, Chris and Gif programmed a series of signals, scenes and sequences that run automatically, bringing a unique and organic lighting aesthetic to the architecture of this iconic Las Vegas hotel and casino.

New Image of Rio

It was entrusted to Ruben Laine, boss of nerds, and to the American studio Creative Integration, to design a control solution that treats video as lighting.

This involved lighting in a video-centric format, which allowed access to micromanageable levels of detail for each vertical LED strip, some of which exceed 4.000 pixel length.

Rio lighting scheme forms part of multi-million dollar refurbishment of resort, managed by Dreamscape Companies. The new LEDs replace 5,8 kilometers of old neon that was installed in the 1990s 90.

The project as a whole is an original idea of Marty Millman, Vice President of Development and Construction at Dreamscape. Specifically, Millman didn't want new lighting that looked like any other generic or clinically pixel-mapped building installation fed with video content.. I wanted something unique, different and stand out.

Marty contacted the artist's creative lighting team, composed by Chris and Gif, to challenge them to produce the specific look he envisioned for the Rio building, inspired by his lighting designs for the band. His work for the artist frequently uses theatrical/stage style linear light sources, as Robe Tetra2 and TetraX, as a dynamic structural basis for its well-known automated truss system, while adding an additional layer of kinetic movement.

Chris and Gif have programmed hundreds of thousands of lighting cues for Phish's various tours and projects., using lighting consoles and effects engines, giving the animation a crisp, clearly defined look. This was exactly what Marty wanted, and a workflow that Chris and Gif know naturally.

Video control for lighting art

Chris and Gif were delighted to accept the mission, but they realized that the enormous number of pixels involved meant that the control DMX directly from a lighting console was not an option.

Using the Avolites media server and artificial intelligence was one of Ruben's first ideas. “I have always liked AI”, comment, and quickly adapted this product for this task, in combination with the powerful real-time graphics rendering of Notch.

Ruben, who has used Avo IA Media servers for more than 10 years, collaborated with the Avolites team in the UK to add a new feature to AI Server Tracking Actions that enables 'random specificity' as a custom playback mode to manage all media, control and programming using a Notch block that Ruben built, allowing lighting control over the entire surface of buildings.

Randomization Philosophy

This custom programming, that allows for randomness, allows the playback of a long base look followed by a series of random sequences before returning to the base look... and repeating the process, which also means that the same series of sequences will never repeat and become predictable. Programmed lighting scenes are divided into two categories: looks base, with subtle animation, y shows, faster, more intense and with greater contrast.

A base look plays for five minutes, followed by a one minute show (all randomly selected), followed by another base look also randomly selected and, finally, another one minute show.

“Be able to dictate a series of files to each clip, of which I would choose randomly for the next, it was amazing”, explain Chris. The lighting programming itself had a more flexible timing, clip a clip, no two clips of the same length, so using tools like Calendar or Macro Script made it impossible to use other tools”.

They began to program lighting with linear elements in Notch, treating each vertical line as its own layer or canvas, complete with dedicated intensity controls and a way to enable solids, gradients or patterns, plus full transformation controls like position and scale, as well as different color and alpha controls.

This meant that a single layer could manipulate complex gradients with a single element, and these layers were stacked.

A second layer, independently controlled, allowed Gif to experiment with lighting programming, stacking two-dimensional controls and creating a set of 20 superlayers to cover the entire set of layers, rendering below 200 linear layers with similar controls and effects, but more complex.

Finally, by including animatable masks, architectural segments and individual characteristics of the buildings could be highlighted, what maintained the architectural identity of Rio.

“We wanted to achieve this without the building being lost in the glamor and shine of its new technicolor veil.”, explain Chris, and adds that “The genius of this control methodology allowed us to use our usual tools and lighting programming workflow during the creative process”.

Lighting Control for video art

Ideas were discussed as if they were standard lighting signals, creating and manipulating them on the fly using a lighting console and its logic, resorting to many of his concert lighting tricks, like sweeps of color all over the canvas, narrow white bands introducing a new color with rocket tips, or creating shapes with negative space and animating them in numerous ways.

With around 50 o 60 slow motion looks and others 50 o 60 fast moving, They needed a server to select them to play them randomly over a year, so that nothing was repeated regularly.

This combination of Notch and Q/Ai series also processes efficiently 2000 pixel data universes in 8 DMX universes ArtNet channels externally exposed. Each sequence is played from the console and ArtNet, is recorded in Notch and then rendered to 60 frames per second to achieve the smoothest possible movement in each pixel of the Rio building facade.

Q Series Media Server sends rendered clips to Clear Led signal processors, which are then transmitted over several kilometers of fiber optic cable.

“The Q/Ai series was undoubtedly a crucial part of this adventure. From our original idea of ​​running the show with Notch blocks live, going through every creative challenge, technical and executive, until final execution. Using Q/Ai allowed us to effectively map the building in just a couple of hours”, Ruben comments.

New Rio lighting system is helping to create more energy and excitement around a classic Las Vegas venue. In addition to exciting visitors, who can marvel at its fascinating beauty, Illustrates new technical possibilities in the scale and imagination of integrated lighting and video control through a dynamic combination of Avolites Q/Ai Series and Notch.