Immersive room in the German Expo Pavilion

360° LED

from invidis Redaktion

“Connecting Minds, Creating The Future”: Creating community and shaping the future, these were the core messages of the German Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai. The pavilion, which attracted more than 2.5 million visitors between October 2021 and March 2022, received the Expo Gold Award, among other honors. One highlight was the Exit Experience: an immersive space with a 360-degree LED installation with swings hanging from the ceiling in the center. The 60 x 2.70 meter LED wall came from Samsung and was installed by sld mediatec from Nuremberg.

 ^{(c) German Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai / Bjoern Lauen}

The German pavilion was to represent a campus in which the visitors, as students, went through various stations: the Energy Lab, the Future City Lab and the Biodiversity Lab. At the end, they came to the Graduation Hall. This graduation experience emphasized the core message in an emotional way: Graduates took a seat on a swing and tried to make it swing in unison as a group. The message: small movements can move big things when you join forces. A video show with personalized messages ran on the 360-degree screen.

Preparations started back in 2017, with the sld mediatec team initially setting up part of the video wall in Nuremberg and feeding it with the video content. The individual cabinets came from Samsung’s IER series with SMD LEDs. According to sld mediatec, one of the selection criteria for the LED technology was reliability: “When Sheikh Mohammed himself enters the German Pavilion as the supreme head of state or Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck is present as a guest, the displays must be 100 percent operational. You can’t afford a failure at an Expo,” says Florian Skrzypczak from sld mediatec.

The selection committee for the German Pavilion, under the direction of Koelnmesse, had commissioned the Cologne-based company Facts and Fiction, which developed the campus concept. The rooms dealt with the topics of energy transition, climate change and sustainability. The immersive elements were intended to engage visitors emotionally and arouse their interest in the big issues. “In our pavilion, people who are strangers to each other were united in a community working on a common task. That’s what sustainability is all about: everyone has to pull together,” says Annika Belisle, Head of Communications at Koelnmesse. “Especially the 360° video installation all around the Graduation Hall contributed to this feeling of togetherness.”

Before visitors entered Graduation Hall, they saw energy lines with solutions for the energy supply of the future in the darkened Energy Lab. In the Future City Lab, students became part of a nested urban landscape surrounding them. In the Biodiversity Lab, they experienced biodiversity under a display mobile.