Event organizers understand that if you want to gather people from the community together, you need to provide something that draws them in –a central attraction. With increasing frequency and creativity, communities are choosing large-format LED displays to serve as their attractions. To figure out why social venues are opting for LED, let’s take a look at two particular Nanolumens installations that have reshaped their surrounding environments and energized their communities.
Municipal Engagement
The city of Peachtree Corners, Georgia, incorporated in 2012 as the only planned community among the suburbs north of Atlanta, has ambitious hopes for their emergent town and they plan to use their spacious Town Green as the primary site for community engagement. The Town Green has long been a colorful, multipurpose site for hosting activities but until recently it lacked any sort of real centerpiece to attract families of all sizes and ages. Taking inspiration from the Atlanta Braves stadium located only a short drive away that uses a cylindrical LED display to connect with fans, Peachtree Corners concluded a huge digital display would be the perfect tool to engage with their youthful, diverse, and digitally savvy citizens, many of whom work for the engineering firms, information technology companies, or logistics organizations that drive the city’s economy.
When choosing the specific type of display they wanted, the city prioritized a few particular traits. “We wanted a solution that we could use every day for the next few years and that was a recognizable element of the park rather than something occasional,” said Brandon Branham, the Assistant City Manager and Finance Director. Alongside this requirement for outdoor durability and multipurpose functionality, the city also prioritized finding a display that was bright enough to compete with the sun and versatile enough to be seen from a wide range of angles while employing a pixel pitch that presented clear content to audiences near and far. This set of requirements aligned perfectly with the talents of Nanolumens, conveniently headquartered only a few miles from the Town Green. Together with a locally based integrator, Nanolumens and the city installed a display measuring roughly 22 feet by roughly 12.5 with a 10mm pixel pitch that is merging leisure, entertainment, and technology for local citizens. As Branham continued, “the Peachtree Corners Town Green is a place where our community can meet to enjoy the outdoors, and a large LED digital screen in the center of this park is fundamental to many of the events we organize.”
Student Body Engagement
As one of the country’s most prestigious institutions, The University of Kansas (KU) knew they needed a better way to engage with students determined to move the business forward. The administration wanted to create a large open space in the Capitol Federal Hall School of Business where all visitors could serendipitously interact and receive fun and informative content regarding events and news around the school and community. In order to manufacture this kind of communal connectivity, the building needed an anchor, a focal point that would immediately draw everyone’s attention. Alongside architects, designers, and integrators, the school opted for a large-format digital display, but faced challenges regarding the viewing range and distance of mobile audiences, as well as concerns with how the display would handle the presence of near-constant ambient light flooding in through large glass windows. These restraints eliminated the consideration of any type of projection system or traditional LCD video wall. Partnering instead with the LED experts from Nanolumens, KU installed two brilliant Nanolumens Engage Series™ LED displays next to a centrally located coffee bar in the building’s spacious atrium. Both displays feature a 2.5MM pixel pitch and they play a critical role in providing daily business school, university, and national news updates for students, faculty and visitors. The displays are also used for special events hosted by the School of Business during the year. According to Dan Nenonen from the Kansas City-based architecture firm GastingerWalker&, “The building was designed to foster creativity and interaction…all the interaction starts at the coffee bar in the main atrium across from where the Nanolumens Engage Series displays are positioned.”
Both the display at the Peachtree Corners Town Green and the one at KU have proven remarkable successes. Each display is used to show movies, deliver content advertising local businesses, and supplement other activities or events with a brilliant digital experience. Neither this city nor this college is the first of their kind to introduce an LED display for the purpose of community engagement, and neither will be the last. As the performance, price, and potentiality of direct-view LED technology improves, so too will the number and diversity of spaces that employ it.