MOTAT, Waxeye & integrator DM Acoustic achieve success on the world stage

International award for Museum’s immersive exhibition

The Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT) took out the award for Best Use of Digital – International category at the prestigious Museums + Heritage Awards in London for their exhibition Te Kōtiu, ‘swoop’ in Māori. Inspired by the success of the 2021 Van Gogh Alive exhibition, MOTAT’s immersive display projects iconic images, film, and graphics from the history of aviation onto two large flying boats, the floor and a special light weight mesh screen, accompanied by a sensational soundscape and Te Reo Māori and English voiceover that brings the three galleries to life.

Curating the Diversity of Flight

Often referred to as the Oscars of the museum world, the M+H Awards have seen many of the world’s greatest museums feature on its shortlist including the British Museum, the Met and Sydney Maritime Museum. Rachel Bush, Senior Exhibitions Content Developer and driving force behind the exhibition experience, acknowledges how much the award means, “We were committed to celebrating the cultural diversity of the history of flight in New Zealand in a way that fully immersed our audience. The M+H award is an acknowledgement of our success on both fronts.”

The museum sought the advice of a kaumatua [a Māori elder] and were fortunate enough to engage Māori artist Nikau Hindin whose artwork has more recently been projected on the Sydney Opera House as part of a First Nation’s showcase Badu Gili. Nikau’s manu aute kites were digitised for the MOTAT display, acknowledging the traditional Māori practice of kite-making. Smaller Kiwi aeronautical and aerospace companies and the stories of modern day female Air New Zealand pilots continue the focus on diversity to the present day. A stirring Te Reo Māori and English voiceover tells the story from the 12000 km migration of the kuaka godwit bird to the present day aerospace industry.

From Content to Immersion

Rachel recalls, “Having curated the content and developed the script, I had a very clear vision. Rather than something static, I wanted the audience to be surrounded by an immersive experience that would engage and hold them in place. With families forming our key audience, it needed to be truly interactive. We wanted particularly young visitors to engage and participate with the storytelling.”

Following a tendering process in January 2023, digital studio Waxeye joined the creative team, with Paul James, Waxeye’s Creative Director bringing in The Production Co’s Paul van’t Hof (Goff) for technical advice. Matt Tucker, Director of DM Acoustic completed the circle, tasked with the design and build of the AV installation. With a demanding seven month time frame, the team set to work to bring Rachel’s ideas to life, collated with the support and curation of Exhibition Content Manager Karla Bo Johnson. Rachel describes the process as rewarding in itself, “The success of the project is due to our truly collaborative approach. Paul and Waxeye brought an ability to create true beauty with their visual storytelling and Matt overcame significant challenges with the budget and the space to craft a magical experience that has totally exceeded my expectations.”

Tackling The Budget & The Space

Matt does recall the budget as being the first challenge, “Our initial dream design was around five times the workable budget so we immediately needed to figure out how to deliver this impactful experience for less money.” DM Acoustic and Goff set to work, “We made use of an in-house data cable and AC that was already in place at a high level, and the house network switching. Goff also had access to used Panasonic DLP projectors with relatively low hours that had been earmarked for the Van Gogh Alive exhibition that was cancelled due to Covid. We were able to make use of these and Panasonic came on board helping access the specific lenses required to achieve the throw angles needed.”

The space with its 15m high ceilings, hanging objects (planes!), interesting surfaces and projection angles also caused a few headaches, “As best we could we used existing drawings and Theo Turner, one of our team, figured out a rigging plan in CAD to work around the objects in the space. As it is a permanent installation, we used Gripple wire ropes to be able to adjust for exact positions in situ, alongside Global truss and DM custom projector fly plates.”

Not only projecting onto planes, the story is also cast onto a semi-transparent special screen, “Nick from ShowTex Australia helped us sort a suitable scrim fabric within a fairly tight time frame. We called on our friends from ETS to assist with particularly difficult high level rigging, whilst protecting the precious planes both on the floor and suspended above on existing wire rope.”

To manage the requirements of multiple projections playing in sync Matt selected Madmapper, “It is a stable media player that can also handle mapping, masking and edge blending needs. We spec’d a custom Win10 IoT PC with a NVIDIA Quadro graphics card as we are running six projectors plus a local monitor. With seven outputs we needed either two cards or a clever external solution to handle our outputs and we opted to avoid multiple cards as that can bring its own issues with sync, GPU usage and cost.”

As the venue already had data cable in place, and SDI or fibre runs would be tricky with the height and distance, Matt settled on using video over IP, also resolving a second problem with the graphics output requirements. Matt expands, “We chose the Just Add Power 3G series as we’d previously found it reliable, fairly priced, and we were able to do some advanced windowing features. It’s reasonably common to use a third party processor to split a 4k image into four 1080 images, however this gives a max vertical resolution of 1080, and we really needed to maximise our projector’s capabilities and use all of the 1200 pixels available. The solution was to rotate our images 90 degrees in Madmapper and fit three 1920×1200 images into a 4k output. This meant we could use two 4k outputs for six projectors, have the local monitor directly connected to the graphics card, and not have sync issues. The Just Add Power receivers also allowed us to window and rotate the final image. This particular model also has a data Pass-Thru which meant we could control the projectors on a single cable, which helped us fit it into the existing quantity of data at high level.”

Audio in an area measuring 20m by 30m was another stimulating puzzle for the team to solve, as the cable runs would be too long for low impedance and Matt and his team did not want to use a 100v line or locate amplifiers at ceiling level which would then require special access equipment to service, “The obvious option was to use audio over IP. At DM Acoustic we tend to install passive speakers and amplifiers for ease of servicing and we don’t love having amps in the air that are hard to get to should a failure occur. In this case, powered speakers were the lesser of two other evils. After some EASE modelling, we chose QSC K.2 powered speakers and Dante Audinate AVIO adapters running in AES67 Mode. Subwoofers are located on the ground and are QSC KW212C with cardioid response to help manage low frequency directivity and control ‘boomyness’ in the large space. Kahra Scott-James [Sound Designer] provided stems that allowed the final mix to be fine-tuned in-room.”

Show control is handled withQSYS Core Nano and TSC-55-G3, including daily scheduling to power projectors on and off, cue Madmapper to run via OSC, and interface with the building lighting’s Pharos processor. Audio from Madmapper is patched via a QSYS USB sound card, and out via Software Dante to all speakers. The touch screen’s UCI allows operators to manually run the show outside of scheduled run times, or bypass the schedule completely for days such as Christmas when MOTAT is closed.

Flight brought to life

For Matt it was one of the most rewarding projects he has been involved in, “At the first public screening it was very special seeing the reaction of the families and the little people running around interacting with the story. The team brought a lot of knowledge from the live entertainment space – our awareness of how to produce and deliver an experience and our technical understanding of system tuning, our design efforts with the audio, and the data projection mapping”

Neil Patton, Waxeye’s Director of Innovation, cites the high degree of trust between all those involved as the key ingredient to bringing this ambitious idea to life, “It wouldn’t have been possible without the true spirit of collaboration that permeated all the project partners. From our wonderful client MOTAT, to the motion team at Waxeye, to the production team at DM Acoustic; we placed trust in each other to make the right decisions when necessary, to have each other’s backs, and to believe that our intentions were always aligned for the greater good. The result is a truly special experience.”

The Te Kōtiu immersive projection experience is included as part of a visit to MOTAT’s Aviation Hall and can be viewed daily, on the hour, from 10.30am.

Gear List:

Audio & Control:

4x QSC K10.2 Powered 10″ 2way 90 deg speakers

2x QSC KS212C Powered Dual 12-inch Cardioid Subwoofer

6x Audinate ADP-DAO-AU-0X1 Dante to Analog Adapters

1x QSYS Core Nano Control Processor / Audio DSP, Scripting & UCI Licences.

1x QSYS TSC-70-G3 7″ Touch Screen

1x Powersheild Centurion RT 1000AV Double Conversion True Online UPS with Network card.

Rackmount Video Server includes:

i5 CPU, 16GB Memory.

Dual 512GB SSD in Raid 1 for redundancy.

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC.

NVIDIA RTX A4000 GPU.

4k Local Monitor for system access and support.

MadMapper 5 Software.

Video over IP:

3x Just Add Power VBS-HDIP-707POE 3G POE Transmitter 4K.

7x Just Add Power VBS-HDIP-509POE 3G POE Daisy Chain Receiver 4K with Ethernet Passthrough.

Cisco Enterprise Switching.

Projection & Rigging:

4x Panasonic RZ990 10k Lumen DLP Projectors (2x planes and edge blended floor).

2x Panasonic RZ790 7k Lumen DLP Projectors (edge blended scrim).

Assortment of Panasonic lenses including DLE105, DLE170, DLE250, DLE60.

DM acoustic in-house custom fly plates.

Global F33 & F23 Truss.

ShowTex GobelinTulle 95% Light grey scrim 2.7m x 7.4m.