emily conrad

My daughter is not one to typically sit down and watch a show for twenty minutes, nor am I one to encourage it. So when we were at Sea World San Diego last week and the in-laws wanted to see the Shamu show (sentimentally titled Believe!), I was a little skeptical. We went in and sat down as a video began to play on four screens above the whale pool. By now it was noon and a bright sunny day. I couldn’t believe how great the LED screens looked! Especially since I was always told LED screens are generally no good, and nothing works in direct sunlight. The assumptions were all wrong.

The show went on, and my daughter was singing and clapping without abandon. I watched the screens, and when they tilted it was a cue that something cute was going to happen, and when they dropped completely to the side, it gave room for the killer whales to jump from the backstage to frontstage. And it all worked really well together. And when I panned across the audience, everyone was so excited. Of course the whales are the center of the show, but the technology they used help to tell the story better, and create much more of an emotional impact. (Photos by Brian Bennett, as I kept my camera dry).

When I came back to NYC I researched the screens a little bit and found out a company called Act One Communications had made the screens. They have a quick little video on their site that somewhat explains their “Virtual Pixel Technology”. Which is essentially offering RGB pixels in a grid as instead of clustering them. The former offers a smoother image contour instead of pixelation that is common in LED screens, as shown here:

If it really is as simple as it sounds, it makes me think there’s so many more advancements we can make with LED screen, especially if we add Z-space and start showing video in 3-D.