Projection Artworks and Justso unveil interactive Faberge egg for Harrods Easter window

Projection Artworks, the UK’s leading pioneer in projection mapping technology, has produced the world’s brightest projection mapping show in the windows of Harrods.

Stuart Henry, award-winning international window designer, conceived the idea of a virtual egg for Faberge’s Easter window. Stuart and his team at Justso visualised an interactive projection show on a 1.5 metre 3D egg-shaped model, and commissioned Projection Artworks to produce the digital content and projection element.

The installation, which celebrates the lead-up to Easter with Faberge, is part of a five-window display with creative agency Justso acting as project guardian. The display also incorporates an interactive touch-screen element to showcase Faberge’s jewellery designs.

Projection Artworks’ animation studio and in-house development team worked together to create dramatic interactive content that allows Harrods shoppers to explore the world of Faberge via a custom-designed touch screen. Shoppers choose their favourite Faberge design and watch a personalised 3D projection show unfold before their eyes, inspired by their selection. In total, ten exclusive new designs are showcased in emerald, ruby, sapphire and diamond variations.

The project represents a huge technical challenge for Projection Artworks and its partner Optoma, which is providing the projectors for the month-long installation. The projection experts created a genuinely daylight visible projection using their unique DisplayMapper technology, which works by applying large amounts of light to relatively small areas. The Faberge egg is covered with an unprecedented 14,500 lumens/sq meter, around 200 times brighter than a typical outdoor building projection.

“This kind of installation would never have been feasible a few years ago,” says Tom Burch, managing director of Projection Artworks, “and the projectors would have been enormous. The continuing development of projector technology is constantly opening up exciting opportunities in retail, even in high levels of ambient light. This is genuinely daylight-visible.”

The projection was made possible by production tool – the D3 4 x 4 Pro, which was able to simulate every aspect of the production in the studio before arriving onsite.

Initially the challenge was to create ultra-high resolution 360° photos of the egg pendants, which in real life only measure approximately 15mm in height. This presented major issues with depth of field, and each egg required 64 photographs from different focal lengths to create the highly detailed 360° models required. The final animations were then rendered out in 16 x HD resolution to properly show off the giant egg in all its glory, 100 times the size of a real Faberge pendant.

Projector alignment was also a challenge as the egg model has no defining corners, but a seamless output was facilitated by high resolution 3D scanning technology.

The installation is in place until March 27th 2015.