With more than 100 theme parks in the pipeline, China’s attractions boom is showing no signs of abating. Responding to this rapid expansion, 7thSense Design, the UK-based manufacturer of the Delta Media Server range, has been working with Beijing audiovisual solutions provider Wincomn Technology, providing a trusted partner on projects across the country.
Wincomn, which is headquartered in Beijing with sub-branches in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Chengdu, Wuhan, Xi’an and Shenyang, provides products, software and hardware solutions for control rooms and conferences, culture and entertainment, and VR and simulation projects.
With expertise in the attractions sector, Wincomn acts as the preferred distributor and integrator for 7thSense Delta Media Servers for theme parks, live shows, museums, science centres and planetariums across China, delivering content for dark rides and theatres, projection mapping and other world-class multimedia experiences. The partnership means clients are offered creative planning, design consulting, system design, hardware and software development, software and hardware integration, operation maintenance and after-sales support.
7thSense has worked closely with the team at Wincomn on more than 30 projects, bringing state-of-the-art installations to China’s most popular visitor attractions.
Incredible realism
For Wincomn, working in partnership with 7thSense enables incredible levels of realism when delivering digital experiences, having recently worked on installations for Wanda, such as Harbin Wanda Movie Park and Nanning Wanda Theme Park, Hunan Museum in Changsha, Hunan province, and large-scale cultural water/light shows in places including Xiamen, Fujian province, and Hancheng, Shaanxi province.
For 7thSense, delivering unparalleled media serving technology involves the ability to offer multi-tool, comprehensive feature sets which can be customised to meet specific client needs and project demands. Delta Media Servers deliver high frame rate, high colour intensity, high-resolution content which is fully supported by a proprietary content management system to enable design, scheduling and show control, and much more.
“Display resolution is now at, or nearing, an eye-limiting level,” says 7thSense Design managing director Matt Barton. “That means pixels can no longer be ‘picked out’ by the human eye. Instead, attention is now turning to other elements that impact display perception and visitor experience: colour bit-depth, colour space, frame rate.
“The cinema world has already been experimenting with high frame rate production and playback with the likes of The Hobbit and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – the latter we supplied our media serving technology to for the testing and uncompressed playback of 4K resolution in 3D at 120Hz (per eye) in 10-bit colour at the film’s worldwide premiers.”
Bringing IPs to life
As the Chinese market develops an appetite for introducing IP-led experiences, demand is growing for large-format 3D/4D/5D rides and theatres powered by cutting-edge multimedia technology. Movie-based rides are an effective way to bring big-name IPs to life with highly realistic and visually stunning content, at the same time helping attract more visitors to the park.
“Audiences also want to control their journey through a story more than ever before. They want to have a level of control over what they see on screen. Interactivity is a hugely important feature of AV that’s becoming increasingly in demand and that’s something Delta Media Server delivers.”
“Our job is to listen and bring together the visions of the end user and the content producers, developing our technologies to enable their ambitions. Behind the scenes, the means of transporting this huge amount of data from source to display are developed to allow for higher fidelity.”
Tech you can rely on
In a multimedia experience, it’s crucial that the technology won’t let you down. Nobody wants to see guests disappointed after finding a ride is closed.
Barton says: “Dependability and reliability are vital. Technology should never interrupt the show and distract the visitor from the story. Many attractions operate for long hours and have little availability for maintenance, so things need to work well and any maintenance must be fast.”
“Working with Wincomn and 7thSense makes sense for clients, as we not only deliver the best quality solutions on the market, but we also have close working relationships with attraction end users, other manufacturers and integrators – across China and the world.”
