News

23 Dec 2017

New LED X-Mas Tree for Adelaide CBD

Entertainment Technology Australia have upgraded the City of Adelaide’s Christmas tree lighting, and when turned on can be seen at night for kilometres in each direction.

The foliage of the 10 story high (30 metre) tree is covered with 13,336 RGB LED pixels that are individually controllable, allowing a myriad of coloured moving animations to be programmed and displayed.

ETA say the project was in development for several months before it’s installation in November, and was a challenge at times.

“We are displaying two dimensional video content on to what really is a big three dimensional cone,” said ETA’s project manager Taylor Chadwick. “We had to drastically crop and skew our animations to counteract resolution changes at different points of the tree.”

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The tree displays a range of Christmas themed animations over the space of a 15 minute show loop. Christmas imagery such as candy canes, baubles and presents as well as shooting stars and colour wraps are incorporated in to the show design. The star is also synchronised to react with the body of the tree.

 

The control solution was an integral aspect of the development process, one that could comfortably process large amounts of data while catering for their creative direction.

Enter German LED control software MADRIX.

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According to the ETA team, MADRIX provided the best option for building and operating the 220 universes over Art-Net. “MADRIX has once again been rock solid for us. It’s intuitive interface for creating the pixel map was important for a project of such scale. We utilised the new CSV import feature to create the map file.”

In action at night, the tree is amazing to watch say the team, bringing a colourful, bright and dynamic display to the CBD during the Christmas season.

The official opening took place on the 1st of December in front of 10,000 people, and the tree will be lit each night from 7:30pm at Victoria Square (Tarntanyangga) during the Christmas period.

View the original story on ETA’s website here

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