A 706 Foot Tower Deserves a 323 Square Foot Video Wall

The highly-anticipated PARAMOUNT Miami Worldcenter residential tower is set to rise above the heart of downtown Miami’s 30-acre mixed-use project, Miami Worldcenter – the second largest urban development in the United States. As a part of the pre-sale initiative to sell space in the soaring 706-foot tower, PARAMOUNT reached out to iHummingbird to discuss audiovisual solutions that could assist in selling condominiums in the PARAMOUNT sales center. Together they came up with a massive video wall that could advertise renderings and animations of what the space would eventually look like.

“I always had a vision when we were working on these high-definition, fly-through animations of the building,” says Dan Kodsi, CEO of Royal Palm Companies, the company behind the PARAMOUNT residential tower. “When we saw the two-story warehouse space we said, ‘How cool would it be to do something here?’ At one point we were thinking projector, but there were issues with lighting and so-forth. So [a video wall] was an extensive feat, but we realized that there was a space in the building that lends itself well. We could use it in the sales center today and then, once we build the project we can get long-term use of it. We felt like we were going to get a lot of mileage out of it, so it was worth the value.”

Working together with iHummingbird, Kodsi ultimately approved Planar Clarity Matrix displays to create the video wall in the sales center space. iHummingbird combined 36 LCD video wall displays into a 323 square-foot digital video wall that serves as the focal point of the sales gallery. The biggest benefit that Planar offered was an all-in-one solution.

Customers sit at a bar and can scroll through renderings of rooms while animations of the tower play over the massive video wall.

“They really have the better solution,” says Richard Berrie, founder and CEO of iHummingbird. “The power supply is not on the panel, everything’s built in and the mounting system is all included. So you get a turnkey solution without having to go to three different vendors. And if there’s a problem, you go to one vendor, you don’t go to three. For me as an integrator, looking out for my customer, it’s great.”

With a single order, iHummingbird received all the components needed for the video wall. Each display weighs approximately 60 pounds, and the EasyAxis Mounting System from Planar ensured the lightweight displays would be easily mountable. The off-board electronics design allows for components and power supplies to be located remotely, and therefore ventilation was of little concern. The ultra-narrow bezels were of particular note to Kodsi, who expressed concern for the breaks in images that video walls could create. Planar installers came on-site after pre-wiring from iHummingbird, and assisted in the installation of the solution to the specifications that iHummingbird designed and engineered.

iHummingbird also created the video distribution system that would push animations to the video wall. The company used a Mac Pro as the source in order to push four 4K outputs, while the source material was in 720p. At minimum, because of the ultra-high definition of the video wall, the material needed to be 1080p. The first time they ran the video, they streamed it through Dropbox, and the image was extremely poor quality. Broadband was too high and download speed became a problem, which was not anticipated.

By uploading the video directly to the Mac Pro, quality was corrected and the company avoided a potential costly effort from the content creation company to rework the content into 4K. The Mac Pro pushes content, and employees can use iPads of iPhones in order to call videos up to the video wall and play sound through the speakers which usually run background music.

Sales representatives are currently utilizing the massive video wall in order to show prospective residents what their potential condominiums will look like when finished. So, after all of this work is the video wall helping employees sell future space in the PARAMOUNT residential tower?

“Oh, absolutely” says Kodsi. “The biggest reason we were attracted to [Planar] was the thin bezel. It feels like one continuous image, even at that size.”