The world’s largest permanent video projection installation

The world’s largest permanent video projection installation has opened at the new National Museum of Qatar. Designed by architect Jean Nouvel, the museum is located in Doha on a 1.5 million sq ft site surrounding the Fariq Al Salatah Palace which had served as a museum of heritage since 1975. The building consists of a ring of interlocking display zones, encircling a large central courtyard area, and its design is inspired by the phenomenon of desert rose crystalline forms, which are like miniature architectural events that emerge from the ground through the work of wind, salt water, and sand. The museum opened to the public in March 2019.

Inside, 21 billion pixels are being processed every second by nine Avolites Ai Q3 servers, alongside another 163 Ai Miami software licences running on 1U 8K media servers custom designed by the London-based visual technology firm RES. The video projection aspects of the project involve a series of “art films”, which were produced by the Doha Film Institute (DFI) in collaboration with handpicked directors and videographers, to immerse visitors in a journey through Qatar’s past, its present and its future aspirations. The projections cover a vast area, co-created by RES, MAN Enterprise/EMPTY Joint Venture and the DFI.

“Avolites Ai is always our go-to software for demanding projects like this – the AIM Codec and Salvation Engine are both powerful and reliable,” said Mark Calvert from RES. “My colleagues Dave Green and Trey Harrison were of course the architects of the original source code for the Ai software, so we are very familiar with what it can achieve when a project needs to go big.”

The AiM Codec is a feature of the Ai software that allows video content to be compressed without losing the quality of the image.

The Avolites Ai Q3 servers and custom-designed 8K servers are feeding more than one petabyte of movie data to 112 Panasonic 4K projectors, which are beaming the content onto the curved interior walls of the museum, known as the "cinematic display zones"’. The data is shared via 50.6km of 3G SDI cabling and each video requires full-motion image resolution as high as 25K by 4K, to cover more than 33,000 sq ft of space. The huge quantity of AV equipment is controlled and monitored by HIVE, a bespoke software package designed by HIVE Media Control.

Avolites sales director Koy Neminathan said: “We are of course thrilled that our latest Ai server, the Q3, and our Ai Miami licences, are in use on a world-class project such as the National Museum of Qatar. The Q3’s slim form belies its cutting-edge, powerful engine which is designed for rock-solid reliability and sheer pixel processing power and we can see this in use now in Doha. We'd like to thank RES and everyone involved in creating the world's largest permanent video projection installation for showcasing what Ai can do on a mammoth scale."