Rundle Lantern

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FEATURE
Rundle Lantern
A very different big screen for Adelaide.
Text: / Andy Ciddor

Let’s be honest, even if you are lucky
enough to live there, Adelaide isn’t the
first city that springs to mind when you
think of innovative town planning and
leading-edge public display systems.
Perhaps because of
this, the Adelaide City
Council was looking
for something bold and
unusual when it ran
a design competition
for projects to enliven
the nightscape at the
eastern end of the
Rundle Mall. Much to everyone’s
surprise the winning concept came
from local design consultancy Fusion,
the only non-architectural entrant in
the competition.
The Rundle Lantern concept
proposed by Fusion’s principal,
Damien Mair, involved wrapping a low
resolution video screen around a rather
unattractive eight-storey council car
park on the corner opposite the Rundle
Mall. The intention was emphatically
not to display anything as mundane
as football, motor racing, advertising,
news or music videos. According to
Mair: “The vision for the Lantern was
to create an experience that would
capture the imagination of the city and
add beauty to people’s lives.” Fusion’s
proposal included the design, provision
and programming of material for the
screen that would include seasonal
and event-related theming and
incorporate creative input from the arts
community.
U Park U Turn
Wrapping any building with over
a 1000sqm of screen presents an
interesting engineering and construction
challenge, but with this building Fusion
had stumbled into some unusual
problems. Intended as a minimum-cost
‘temporary solution’ to CBD parking
needs in the 1960s, the U Park building
was bolted together from oversized
meccano set steel beams to straddle the
existing single-story shops that fronted
on to Rundle street.
The vehicle exhaust ventilation system
for the car park followed the common
approach of natural ventilation by
omitting most of the walls. Discussions
with a range of interested parties and
engineering consultants, resulted in the
specification that any screen installed
had to retain 50% of the natural airflow
to avoid the budget-crippling need
for mechanical ventilation. Clearly a
screen that is 50% holes does not make
particularly impressive viewing unless
you can’t see the holes. The solution
was based on the concept of the louvre
windows that were so popular in
Australian homes before we started
using air conditioners.
The final design consisted of 748
anodised aluminium panels, arranged in
22 rows and 34 columns. Each 1.4sqm
panel is carefully angled to provide
visual continuity from street level, yet
retain 50% of the airflow from the
original open-wall design. The images
FEATURE 049
“Wrapping any building with over a
1000sqm of screen presents an interesting
engineering and construction challenge”
are created on the screen by illuminating
each panel from light sources hidden in
the top of the panel below it.
Realising that LEDs were probably
the only type of light source that could
provide the colour
range, longevity and
energy efficiency
required for the screen,
Fusion went looking
around the world for
a company that could
not only provide the
necessary high-output
LEDs, but also the control technology
to drive them as part of a large screen
system.
Space Cannon Broadside
Mair was impressed by the work of
Space Cannon of Italy, particularly
what had been achieved with the
headquarters of the Dexia Group in
Brussels, Belgium, which at the time was
one of the most sophisticated projects
ever attempted. On contacting Space
Cannon to enquire about engaging
their expertise on the project, Mair was
more than a little surprised to find that
the control system and programming
for the Dexia Group headquarters had
actually been done by Melbourne-based
Fabian Barzaghi and Dan Ditmann of
Space Cannon Australia.
The Space Cannon proposal (that was
ultimately implemented on the project),
was to light each of the 714 active
panels with a pair of independently
controlled, custom-built Bisquit LED
luminaries, resulting in a display with
1428 addressable ‘pixels’. The Rundle
Lantern version of the Bisquit are IP66rated
exterior fixtures, containing 12
A sample of the moods and flexibility of the Rundle Lantern. Images and sequences are composed remotely at the Fusion studio and uploaded to the Green
Hippo controller via a secured broadband link (images courtesy of Fusion).

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FEATURE
Tiles mounted on the U Park building at angles to allow adequate ventilation of vehicle exhaust fumes.
Images: Andy Ciddor.
high-efficiency LED sources (4 x red, 4 x green
and 4 x blue), configured for full-spectrum
RGB colour mixing via the DMX512A control
protocol, and remotely addressable via the
Remote Device Management (RDM) protocol.
The Space Cannon package also included the
design, commissioning and programming
of a suitable data distribution, control and
programming system.
Although the Rundle Lantern is low
resolution compared to even a standard
definition TV, it still requires a rather
substantial 4284 channels of lighting DMX512
control to operate it. Feeding DMX data and
allocating DMX addresses to 1428 fixtures is
not a trivial problem. The DMX network limit
of 32 devices connected in any one daisychain
necessitated an eight-way optically-isolated
splitter for each of the nine DMX universes.
Transport for the nine DMX streams was via
Ethernet using ArtNet, the public domain
DMX-over-Ethernet protocol developed by
Artistc Licence in the UK.
Rather than attempt the nightmare task of
allocating a DMX address via DIP switches
on each fixture at the point where they were
either unpacked or fixed to the display panels,
Barzaghi and Ditmann had specified that the
luminaires should be capable of communicating
via the recently ratified Remote Device
Management extension to the DMX512
protocol. The RDM software deployed in the
Bisquit luminaires was developed for Space
Cannon by Australian RDM pioneers Enttec.
Using a standard notebook computer fitted
with an Enttec RDM interface and controller
software, Barzaghi and Ditmann were able to
identify and interrogate each fixture once it
was in place and assign its allocated address
without touching the luminaire, a process
that saved many dozens of hours of fiddling,
double handling and construction time.
Seeing the Light
Images for the Lantern are displayed using
a Green Hippo Hippotizer V3 Stage media
server that takes a video feed and translates it
on-the-fly into the appropriate ArtNet control
signals to drive the LEDs in each Space
Cannon ‘pixel’. The Hippotizer is located
(together with its outside communications
links) in the bottom of the U Park building.
Keeping the Hippotizer company in that rack
is an Enttec E-Streamer replay system which,
because it has both an astronomical clock and
ArtNet output, has been allocated the menial
task of powering the LED fixtures up and
down for each night’s presentation.
Several floors above the Hippotizer,
perched in a corner of the carpark near the
midpoint of the screen, is the control rack
packed with Enttec DataGate, EtherGate, and
ODE ArtNet-to-DMX converters, a pile of
Tech Art DMX splitters, power distribution
modules, a relay rack and a large collection
TechArt DMX patch panels.
Content creation and management for
the Lantern is supplied as part of an ongoing
contract by the design team at Fusion, using
Green Hippo’s Pixel Mapper software and the
Zoo Keeper remote management software,
from their facility in central Adelaide.
Although starting out as a project that would
probably call on a range of outside consultants
and overseas companies, the majority of this
landmark development was put together by a
team of world-class locals. �
See some of the Rundle Lantern programming live
on webcam (it updates every five seconds) at
www.cityofadelaide.com.au/rundlelantern
Andy Ciddor attended the opening of the Rundle
Lantern as a guest of Space Cannon Australia.
Space Cannon Bisquit fixtures with diffusion on near side
for even illumination of the tiles.
Equipment list
1428 x Space Cannon Bisquit custom 12 LED RDM
9 x TecArt Splitter 8 way opto isolated
9 x TecArt 8 way patch panels
1 x TecArt 12 channel relay rack
1 x Enttec E-Streamer
1 x Enttec Datagate DE
1 x Enttec Ethergate
1 x Enttec ODE
1 x Green Hippo Hippotizer V3 Stage
with Pixelmapper software and Zoo Keeper
1 x Netgear Gigabit switch
Sightlines were calculated for each tile to provide sufficient
visual overlap and optimum ventilation.
(Images courtesy of Fusion)