Sentosa
Attractions Gets Innovative
Laser/Lighting
Show Control System
By Jason Fischer, Technical Services
East
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Technical
Service East of Taiwan recently completed
a major show control system and laser
hardware upgrade at Sentosa, Singapore’s
leading tourist attraction. The show,
Magical Sentosa produced by ECA2 of
France, is an adventure into the magical
world of Kiki the Monkey. The character
Kiki is brought to life with computer
animation and projected on a water screen
using a DLP video projector. His funky
friends are projected in laser graphics
on three different water screens. Kiki’s
magical world is given texture and pizzazz
with a host of special effects including
dancing fountains, flame effects, air
shoots, Space Cannons, intelligent lighting,
YAG beams and fireworks. The hardware
upgrade was made to maintain top show
quality and to control operating costs.
The growing international popularity
of Kiki the Monkey made system reliability
and show consistency a primary concern
to Sentosa management.
As the
old control system was a proprietary
design, service and spare parts were
only available from a single source
located outside Singapore. In addition,
programming of new shows by other vendors
was difficult because it required vendors
to learn the proprietary control protocols
for programming the equipment. Technical
Service East responded with an upgrade
that replaced all of the proprietary
show control hardware with a state-of-the-art
system designed around off-the-shelf
components.
The new
digital system is fully automated and
is operated by a single command entered
at the master control console touch-screen.
Show data is distributed from the main
control room to the various equipment
locations via telecommunication fiber-optic
cables. The digital encoding and decoding
is accomplished with the Optical Showlink
Transcoder from Raven Systems Design,
which allows use of standard hard disk
recorders without the need for special
modifications. The operator interface
for the system is a touch-screen PC
running Showlink Multimedia Player (a
Technical Services East program that
is used for playing back shows). The
player software is directly interfaced
to the hard disk recorders. From the
single control console, operators can
manually pretest all show equipment
and automatically run the entire day’s
sequence of shows and announcements
with simple commands.
The open
architecture is a major technical advance
for the laser and multimedia industries
and benefits clients in several ways.
The new setup leverages existing technology
by designing the system around standard
components from the audio, lighting,
computer, and telecom industries. This
means the main system components have
benefited from millions of dollars
of R&D as well as decades of real-world
use. Furthermore, spare parts and service
for these components can be sourced
locally. The second main benefit comes
from the use of industry standard control
protocols—ILDA for Laser and DMX for
everything else. This means that any
multimedia company can easily program
new content, which gives clients more
options.
To further
increase show reliability, a major upgrade
was also done to the main laser graphics
projector. The old design used a single
large-frame white-light laser, which
left the show vulnerable to laser problems.
The new design uses two mid-frame white-light
lasers, combining the beams to provide
real-time, on-line redundancy, and a
much better color balance.
Technical
Service East: (+886) 916 532268; Email:
Jason_fischer@att.net
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