A 360-degree Harrods installation crossed technical frontiers to make it visible in daylight.
Projection Artworks and global design consultancy JUSTSO have illuminated the windows of world-famous department store Harrods with the planet's brightest projection mapping show.
Conceived for Fabergé's Easter storefront display, the 360-degree mapped 3D installation is based on the company's pendent designs – which are 1/100th of the size of the 1.5m model – and incorporates an interactive touchscreen element to showcase the detail of the jewelry.
Most impressively, the Fabergé egg is covered with a whopping 14,500 lumens/sqm – that means it's around 200 times brighter than the typical outdoor building projection – making it visible in daylight.
For lead creative Gavin MacArthur, this created all sort of unusual challenges. "The lighting conditions and projector setup were unlike anything I've ever worked on in 10 years of making content for projections, so we had to rethink our grading process to allow for the incredibly bright projectors and the daylight/night conditions."
"For example, our first creative treatment used too much black and was completely scrapped once we saw exactly how daytime ambient light affected it."
The 360-degree canvas also proved tricky. Effects needed to seamlessly run around the egg, but also be able to jump off the surface.
"We tried a huge range of 2D and 3D effects to see which worked best," says MacArthur. "Because of the unusual canvas, it was sometimes more difficult to imagine how an effect would look until we'd run projection tests and seen it in a physical space."
For head interactive developer Scott Millar, the biggest challenges involved working with so many projectors and different systems, and ensuring the installation would work all day, every day, on one of London's busiest shopping streets.
"It was also very challenging to physically fit in all the hardware without having it in plain sight and ruining the magic," Millar adds. "We had to 'hide' 16 projectors, each of which had to be positioned very exactly to cover a precise portion of the egg. As well as the projectors, there were also cables, signal processors, networks and power runs that had to be hidden away."
Since launching, the Fabergé area of Harrods has been flooded with visitors. The installation will be in place until 27th March, so don't miss your chance to see the projection in action.
