It was a big show for the retail industry and Worldstage helped Oracle Retail Group have a commanding presence at the NRF's 101st Annual Convention & Expo at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City. Worldstage, the new brand for Scharff Weisberg and Video Applications, supported the high-tech company with a unique videowall featuring a live Twitter feed that captured the attention of visitors to what's known as "Retail's BIG Show," sponsored by the National Retail Federation.
More than 25,000 people from 78 countries attended the 2012 event held January 15-18. Former President Bill Clinton was the convention's keynote speaker.
When the client presented technical director David Rome of RomeAntics with the design, David reached out to Worldstage President, Josh Weisberg for assistance with the equipment and programming.
Worldstage, Inc. provided Oracle with a beautiful hi-res videowall for the upper level of their booth along with a video playback system that integrated a customized live Twitter feed into the imagery. The wall, which displayed Oracle's large-format graphical content, was comprised of 32 narrow-bezel NEC 46-inch LCD monitors.
"We worked closely with David and the booth designer ShowCraft, to coordinate the details of the installation." comments Michael May, Sr. Account Executive at WorldStage. "Our team developed a custom mounting structure to help support the weight of the large videowall on the second level of the booth. Space for the wall mounts and control was tight, so the control racks also had to be customized to fit in the space. The folks at Showcraft were great to work with and modified their plans to allocate room for these items."
"We used Dataton's WATCHOUT system as the primary playback device for the display," says Josh Perlman, WorldStage's Project Manager who managed the installation of the video system. "In addition, we chose WATCHOUT's Dynamic Image Server toolset to 'key' in a live Twitter feed across the lower-quarter of the wall."
WATCHOUT programmer and operator Josh Silverman adds, "We developed a Flash animation to pull Tweets from the @OracleRetail Twitter account and animate them on and off the wall. The WATCHOUT Dynamic Image Server executed a Flash file then pushed the rendered frames of text out to the WATCHOUT display machines, which layered the Tweets, with transparency, onto the bottom quarter of the videowall."
"Everyone was very happy with Oracle's innovative videowall," reports David Rome. "Worldstage performed very well on the busy convention floor."
WorldStage Inc., the company created by the merger of Scharff Weisberg Inc and Video Applications Inc, continues a thirty-year legacy of providing clients the widest variety of entertainment technology coupled with conscientious and imaginative engineering services. WorldStage provides audio, video and lighting equipment and services to the event, theatrical, broadcast and brand experience markets nationally and internationally.