360° LED
"Connecting Minds, Creating The Future": Building community and shaping the future 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, was honored with the Expo Gold Award, among other accolades. One highlight was the Exit Experience: an immersive space with a 360-degree LED installation, with swings hanging from the ceiling in the middle. The 60 x 2.70-meter LED wall was supplied by Samsung and installed by sld mediatec from Nuremberg.
(c) German Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai / Bjoern Lauen
The German pavilion was designed to represent a campus where visitors, as students, passed through various stations: the Energy Lab, the Future City Lab, and the Biodiversity Lab. Finally, they arrived at the Graduation Hall. This graduation experience emotionally underscored the core message: the graduates took their seats on a swing and tried to swing it in unison as a group. The message: small movements can achieve great things when people work together. A video show with personalized messages ran on the 360-degree screen.
Preparations began back in 2017. The sld mediatec team initially set up part of the video wall in Nuremberg and fed it with video content. The individual cabinets were 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 head of state or Federal Minister for Economic Affairs 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, led by Koelnmesse, commissioned the Cologne-based company Facts and Fiction to develop the campus concept. The rooms addressed the topics of energy transition, climate change, and sustainability. The immersive elements were designed to emotionally engage visitors and spark their interest in these major issues. "In our pavilion, strangers were united in a community working on a common task. That's exactly what sustainability is all about: everyone has to pull together," says Annika Belisle, Head of Communications at Koelnmesse. "The 360° video installation in the Graduation Hall in particular contributed to this feeling of togetherness."
Before entering the Graduation Hall, visitors 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 an intertwined urban landscape surrounding them. In the Biodiversity Lab, they experienced biodiversity under a display mobile.
