Digital Signage at the Heart of New Visitor Experience at Frits Philips Music Building
Scala powers high tech way finding and entertainment system
The Frits Philips Music Building is regarded as one of Europe’s top ten concert halls, attracting over 160,000 visitors each year. It’s renowned among musicians and listeners alike for its excellent acoustics. The building houses two concert halls: a large hall with 1250 seats and a smaller one with a capacity of 400 places. The program is very diverse, ranging from classical and light music to pop, rock, jazz and folk. The Music Building hosts performances of national and international artists like Oleta Adams, Joe Jackson, Paolo Conte, Sabrina Starke, the Russian National Orchestra, Dulce Pontes, 10CC, the Tokyo String Quartet & Heath Quartet and the Budapest Festival Orchestra.
The Challenge
The acoustics in the Music Building and especially the concert halls is of an extraordinary high level.
In order to match that high standard and even adding value to the visitor’s experience, the management team of the venue decided to redesign and rebuild all visitor areas, except the concert halls.
A visually attractive way finding and visitor information system needed to play a significant role in the new look and feel of the Music Building stated the Management of the venue in its renovation plans. The output of new systems had to be fully in line with the new and modern interior design; it had to be intuitive, stable and easy controllable and manageable.
“Working together in a multi disciplinary team incl. creative people has again been a very rewarding experience. Being the catalyst both from a human and technology point of view created another great innovative visitor experience!” – Luc Heijnen, MD, Troades
The Solution
Hypsos, a global design and fabrication company, was appointed by the Music Centre’s management team to develop the redesign of the venue. It was the company’s task to advice in the area of techniques for image, sound and light to update the Music Centre into a state of the art international cultural meeting place. In the early development stages Scala was consulted as to how digital signage could be integrated in the solution.
After summarizing the needs and specifications for the project an RFP was issued and AV company Mansveld was selected as the preferred partner for the execution of the project. Because of Troades’ experience in both future proof experience innovations and managing multi disciplinary projects, the company was asked to coordinate the implementation of various aspects of the project, especially the digital signage part.
The innovative digital signage network at the centre is managed by a Medialon system which controls all AV hardware and lightning.
This results in an audio-visual feast, produced through a network that is easy manageable by the operational management team. Via a touch panel solution that holds a selection of themes, the atmosphere in the Building can be managed and adapted to the type of concert that is due to play at that specific time slot.
Various elements of the system, powered by 25 Scala players in total, work in close harmony and inform and entertain visitors and employees throughout the building.
Scala players are used for way finding purposes on various walls in the building via projectors. These inform visitors about the program in the concert halls, the starting times of performances, the route towards a particular show/hall and they indicate the upcoming or present shows at the entrance of the halls.
Revolutionary LED tiles on the ceiling guide visitors from the entrance area into the right concert hall by subtle lighting. The lights form a path from a high-tech information wall indicating the current program, over the ceiling towards the concert hall for that particular performance.
The multimedia wall in the foyer of the building is a real eye-catcher.
This installation consists of a LED wall of 13 meters wide and 3.5 meters high, driven by one Scala Player.
