Land Rover L460 Projection Experience

In December 2021, Land Rover's private showroom in Solihull reopened after refurbishment. Opening with the immensely stylish L460 and invited by Imagination - London, dandelion + burdock created tailored projection mapping animations under the guise of Creative Director Cath Elliott.

While our team setup the content workflow and made beautiful new hero visuals, the unique space went through a technical overhaul, which was facilitated by Creative Technology UK.

The showroom is an oval shaped lounge where owners get to meet their new vehicle for the first time. Crafting this experience was our joy and challenge.

The Land Rover showroom hosted the first-of-it's-kind fixed install car mapping for 10 years on a daily basis. Projectors, media servers and switching hardware have improved significantly over this period and the original equipment was clearly ageing.

In our opinion refurbishments of a fixed installation needs to happen in minimal changeover time, while the new technology is required to meet or surpass previous specifications such as weight, power consumption, and noise. As the old system is removed and a new one commissioned, other daily operations at the site should be uninterrupted.

Success criteria are; greater audio-visual impact, increased lifetime, and exceeding any previous user experience for the operational staff.

To document the original status and to capture good data for the change process we conducted a laser survey of the space with a car positioned as it would be at show time. During the setup the whole team could experience the method and consider improvements on vehicle loading, calibration patterns, sock fitting, projection coverage and more.

The scan data was converted into a model containing important features like rigging positions, speakers, light and projector placements, audience point of view and automation devices. The Creative Technologies' team decided to match the existing fixture positions for the projectors, which was succeeded by brightness & coverage studies, workflow and best server match.

The ideal pixel size of 2.5mm on the car's surface resulted in 7x WUXGA projectors for the room, covering the rear wall, car and floor. With a clearly defined timeline and discreet automation cues, our content team worked in traditionally rendered video content, rather than realtime. Disguise's solo server was the ideal match for this scope. The 2U unit fit the budget and allowed for a mirror backup machine, while both occupied the rackspace as the previous single playback device. Using disguise also allowed our studio to preplan all car rotations and test the delivery pipeline before going to site. The kiosk and fixed installation target for the solo gave us all the benefits of disguise's software including collaboration in the integration phase, which helped to stick to a strict schedule.

The new content was designed to introduce the core values of the new L460 with drama and style. We created photo-real animations that revealed firstly the interior of the vehicle, showing the optional seating configurations and framework. Then we took the audience on a journey through nighttime storms in a forest, a digital urban landscape and a beautiful city at dawn. All designed to demonstrate the new technology on display with the L460.

The content was created in-house by our team of motion designers working with Houdini and rendering the high resolution outputs with Redshift. This tried and tested workflow allows us the build custom tools to create all the FX we need to deliver exciting and dynamic content with flexibility and confidence.