Aktuelle News & Schlagzeilen

Hippotizer Tierra+ MK2 drives visuals at Vex Robotics World Championship

A Green Hippo Hippotizer Tierra+ MK2 Media Server drove centre stage visuals at the Vex Robotics World Championship 2023, which brought young innovators from around the world to compete using their school-engineered robots.

Held at the 10,000-capacity Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in downtown Dallas, the championships took place over ten days and featured an opening and closing ceremony, competition battles, and an awards presentation. This year’s visual setup was made up of a 3:1 aspect ratio (63’ wide x 20’ high) main stage wall, which included a 12’ x 9’ guillotine door in the center for presenters to enter and exit throughout the show.

To accommodate all audience members in the in-the-round arena, a large LED screen ‘chandelier’ was hung in the centre of the venue above the stage, creating a viewing opportunity to any seat in the house. The chandelier was an equilateral triangle made of three 52’ wide x 13’ high LED screen sides and three 13’ x 13’ end caps at each point of the triangle.

Event designer So Midwest, Inc. was asked to design the staging, lighting, and video elements for the main events. “Our visual deliverables were a mix of looping 2D illustrative style assets and shiny and crisp 3D renders of the competition robots and game pieces”, explains So Midwest’s Robb Jibson. “When we started looking at the raster maps and the sheer amount of pixels that would be required to feed the staging screens and the additional broadcast elements it quickly became apparent that the Hippotizer Tierra+ MK2 Media Server was the only product that could service it.”

So Midwest created all video content, drawing inspiration from the Vex Robotics branding. One of the biggest parts of the opening ceremony was the “Parade of Nations” where all the teams walk out from backstage, pause for photos in front of the stage and move on to their seats. For this section, So Midwest displayed the competing country’s name, flag, location on the globe and the outline of the country using custom scripted TouchDesigner nodes to pull all the country assets together.

“Because there were more than sixty countries represented, we accumulated a few hundred assets just for this section of the show”, says Jibson. “The Tierra+ MK2 Media Servers ingested the assets and we were able to place multiple animated pieces anywhere our client asked.” For live gameplay feeds on the chandelier’s IMAG screens, the team had different presets which could overlay the live scoring system visuals that were fed from the client.

“With any show that changes constantly, the versioning system and ability to drop updated assets into the same banks and pools really speeds along the updating process and keep track of it”, says Jibson. “The 10G network infrastructure on the Tierra+ MK2 creates a direct and fast link between the content creators and the show operators and allows the organisation and manipulation of assets to be stress free.”

“The speed and amount of outputs on the Tierra+ MK2 allowed us to reduce the amount of hardware that we needed - we were able to get this down to just one machine with a tracking backup”, he continues. “The custom EDID ability of the Hippotizer software also allowed us to get the most out of the available canvas, and feeding the Barco Encore systems with the information they need to be efficient.”

The Media Server operator was Chad Lussier. So Midwest touched base with the Green Hippo support team during the pre-production process, to identify any issues and help assess what products are needed.

(Photos: Green Hippo)

www.green-hippo.com

© 1999 - 2024 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories