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Features
Seven large Lighthouse LED screens installed at Heathrow’s T5 for Nokia are built into five ventilation towers, dressed in blue glass. Five are for landside passengers with a screen on each of the five towers, and there are two airside, mounted on the rear of two towers. Since December 2005 Nokia has opened nine flagship stores: Moscow; Chicago; New York; Helsinki; Hong Kong; Mexico City; Shanghai; London and now Heathrow’s T5. In the new Heathrow air terminal, Nokia’s flagship store is airside but the five landside screens are designed and positioned to entertain and entice those checking in to explore the store once they have moved into the departure lounge. “Terminal 5 at Heathrow is one of the UK’s most prestigious and newsworthy construction projects,” says Lighthouse’s UK General Manager, Simon Taylor, “and we are proud to provide its most eye-catching focal point.” The installation, designed and specified by 767 AV Consultants, features all seven displays based on Lighthouse’s front access 10mm panels in landscape, 14.08x3.36m, orientation. “We had to use LED panels,” says 767’s Graham Wickman, “because there is so much natural light in Terminal 5 and a medium that coped successfully with outdoor light levels was essential. In addition, because the screens are mounted on the ventilation towers, they had to be front access and also meet stringent weight criteria. They are located over 15m above the terminal floor, so we were able to choose a screen that was a good balance between resolution and value for money.” |
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With the five ventilation towers spaced equidistantly along the length of the terminal, content is formatted as a single unit across all five screens, maximising the Nokia message. “This is a very important part of the design,” Wickman points out. “The specially commissioned content is the same as used in all the flagship stores and is deliberately designed to spread across all the screens.”
The system integrator was Electrosonic, with content management by Beam Systems. The source equipment is located within the Nokia store which transmits required content from the PC source to a local control rack and the screens via fibre optics. The control equipment is also linked to Nokia's global content management system, enabling content to be centrally broadcast to the screens.
Lighthouse Technologies develops, manufactures and supplies modular LED video panels which it assembles into large screens for indoor and outdoor applications. The Hong Kong based company manufactures in China and is the world’s largest independently owned LED producer. The global organisation also has sales and technical facilities in Europe, USA, Latin America and Asia Pacific.
For Europe, London is Lighthouse’s hub where its self-sufficient office, opened in 2000, operates independently of China, providing a complete service for its European customers, as a business to business set-up selling to integrators. The company boasts a wealth of reference sites across Europe, from high street stores to signature buildings, including Reuters, Canary Wharf and more.
According to Simon Taylor, Lighthouse targets the leisure space, with its panels ideally placed to draw passers-by into stores. Its range covers ultra-high resolution, 4mm pitch LED panels for close viewing within a 5m range, to fine detail 10mm pitch panels as used at T5 Heathrow. Taking the technology forward, Lighthouse has also developed LEDscape LED bars which when assembled can be assembled into any display shape.
LEDscape Bar enables, says Simon Taylor, more creative and architectural LED creations, ideal for large building with a colour wash appearance, for example close up, but great image displays from distance. The innovation comprises a matrix of 32 RGB LED pixels housed in a 2m long, 35mm wide weatherproof enclosure. With a pixel brightness of 15,625mcd, wide viewing angles together with Lighthouse’s proprietary technology ensure remarkable colour uniformity. Some 28.15 trillion colours can be accurately reproduced indoor and outdoor.
The Lighthouse display for its LED arrays is an open ended system built, says Simon Taylor, around any content management system you like. The interfaces are easy to integrate, hooking up to any DVI signal, using pixel mapping and without compression. As well as manufacturing LED screens, Lighthouse also produces control systems for rental or purchase applications.
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LED screen solutions are scaleable, limited only by budget and requirements, says Simon Taylor. The high definition systems deliver accurate colour reproduction, with the red and blue wavelength LEDs generating true colours at broadcast quality. Lighthouse has instigated a processing system physically selecting components for colour uniformity. Depth of colour is controlled by processing power, with higher powered systems giving a wider colour gamut. Essentially, LED screens are simple displays of light, driven by a PC. The more power the PC has, the more communication can be channelled through a system in terms of management, preventative maintenance, audience interaction, directional sound and more. “These are not just passive displays, “ says Simon Taylor. “And they are not limited by standard products. We produce the building blocks to create any shape, abstract and even 360O cylinders, just driven by a computer.” So where is LED technology taking us? According to Simon Taylor, LED technology is now the thing for designers and architects to take advantage of. He sees a big growth area in fixed installations, especially now with all lighting practices focussing heavily on LED technology. In operation, Lighthouse LED panels, operating 24/7 on average power, can last ten years or more, depending on care and maintenance. Systems need to be well ventilated but they do have major advantages in being IP65 rated and hence weather resistant. For indoor applications, the technology is fanless and therefore the units run cool and there is no associated noise. Panels are easy maintenance with a low component count. They are easily serviced and recyclable, with failed LEDs easily replaced. Retail provides huge prospects for LED technology utilisation. Brands such as Chanel, Gucci and a host of others, have already signed up to the concept. The fashion brands are using LED technology to provide updates on their latest ranges and, according to Simon Taylor, it provides the obvious medium to cope with fast changing content. |
London’s HMV store was the first in the UK to adopt LED screen technology some eight years ago. Today, the screen is still performing well. Across Europe, Lighthouse screens can be seen at stations such as Utrecht, as well as Schipol airport and retailers such Desigual, the Spanish clothing brand that set up shop in London’s Regent Street. In Marcianese, Italy, the 100,000m2 Campania Centro Commerciale shopping centre houses a centrally focussed Lighthouse LED screen.
Big Screen Swindon, the first giant, permanent BBC screen in the South West of England went live last month, forming part of the Wharf Green development under The New Swindon Company’s planned regeneration.
Istanbul’s exclusive Nisantasi shopping mall has installed ten Lighthouse screens. On the exterior wall, above the main entrance is a portrait orientated 6x20 panel, 6.12x15.2m curved P16i/o LED screen. It entices shoppers in to indulge their taste where another 5x6 panel, 5.1x4.56m P16 delivers more targeted content.
Further into the building, a 4x5 panel, 2.56x2.4m P6 screen is situated opposite the elevator entrance on each of the centre’s eight floors. The panels are controlled by two Lighthouse X-drive Pro and two LIP-KX processors for the curved screen, an X-drive Pro and LIP-DX for the indoor P16 screen and an Xdrive Pro and eight LIP-DX for the P6 screens.
