Since 1956, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, located inside the track of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway itself in the enclave suburb of Speedway, IN, has been celebrating the landmark racing venue and auto racing in general. Across 80,000 square feet, the museum features more than 150 cars on display and more than 55,000 artifacts. Each year, around 140,000 people pay a visit.
Recently, the museum underwent a renovation that included the deployment of a curved video exhibit made up of Absen NX Series LED modules with a 1.8mm pixel pitch and a mounting system designed and built by Draper. With the goal of drawing guests into the excitement of race day, the L-shaped structure features an end wall that's almost 16 feet tall and 19 feet wide connected to a ceiling display that's 61 feet long and 19 feet wide that display images of airplanes flying overhead, cannons going off, fireworks, and, of course, the track.
“We really wanted to provide guests the experience of what it’s like to be on the grid—that immersive experience of what that morning feels like,” Mandi Bender, VP of operations at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum in Indianapolis, said in a video produced by Absen. “When the cannon goes off and the fireworks are happening, that’s all happening above you and it’s just really fantastic.”
Pieces In Place
Absen NX Series LED panels come in multiple sizes. For this display, the company supplied a combination of panels measuring 960x540mm and 240x540mm. “It’s a longer panel and a narrow panel for the end wall and the ceiling,” explained Ken Kalish, sales director for key accounts at Absen.
Clair Global Integration collaborated with Absen and Draper on the display’s design. Philip DiPaula, director of immersive systems at the company, explained the importance of conducting accurate discovery prior to mounting the exhibit. “The challenge was the coordination of fitting the mounting frame into the building, attaching it to the building structure, [and] distributing the weight loads in the way that we required,” DiPaula recalled.
Because the AV team was working in an existing building, one that had undergone some modifications, it couldn’t rely on the documentation dating back to the original construction of the facility. “There were LiDAR [Light Detection and Ranging] scans done so we knew where the beams were that we could attach to in reality, not what the blueprint said,” he added.
Clair Global also needed to remain in regular contact with the media team that was producing the display’s content—in this case, Boston Productions. “They wanted to be able to pre-vis this wall, so we had to try to get the wall installed early in the process,” DiPaula said. He added that the media team needed to take into account the curvature of the display, something it couldn’t do at its own offices.
Grant Wylie, director of AVMS product management at Draper, relayed that when suspended LED displays that serve as ceilings are connected with LED wall elements, it’s usually at a 90-degree angle. “In this instance, we needed to be able to not only support that," he noted, "but then create a curved structure."
Instead of using curved LED panels, Draper had to create a faceted curve out of flat panels, where each row of cabinets along the line of the curve is slightly angled. For this exhibit, the tolerance target between each row was 0.18mm, one-tenth of the pixel pitch, when the display heats up and expands. “Our goal is that once everything is turned on and it’s running and operating—and the display is heated up—that the spacing between those flat LED cabinets are positioned at an angle that matches exactly what the pixel pitch is on the rest of the display,” Wylie explained.
When developing the faceted curve, Draper’s team opted to treat each row of LED panels as a separate display. “That way, each row expands in and out on its own depending on what content is [being shown] and its brightness value, instead of linking them all together and then having the whole thing expand,” Wylie said.
Calculating for heat expansion involves several variables, including data provided by the manufacturer, the past experience and knowledge of those designing the mounting structure, and what type of content the display will be running. For example, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum the exhibit shows a lot of bright images, like a clear blue sky. This means more heat, which, in turn, results in more expansion. “We were anticipating somewhere between 0.7mm to almost 1mm expansion per LED cabinet—and that’s pretty much at the module level of the ceiling section,” added Wylie.
Accounting for Maintenance
Not only does this approach make the viewing experience seamless, but it also preserves the life of the LED panels. If Draper didn’t take their expansion and contraction into consideration, the ceiling would expand, crushing the corner section where the curve and the flat end wall meet. Wylie noted that this approach also alleviates the need to shut down the display entirely to let it cool down prior to servicing, something that could take a couple of days.
Plus, LED displays featuring faceted curves make for a more economical solution because clients don’t need to invest in curved technology. “The end user is buying LED cabinets that are flat, which is a more standardized product,” Wylie said.
DiPaula noted that during the design phase, he and his team at Clair Global also needed to consider how technicians would service the panels on the ceiling portion of the display. Traditionally, LED panels are serviceable from the front; a tech may simply pop them out to access the components within, while power connections are made through the back of the cabinets.
However, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, power is fed to the cabinets from above. The structure is open on the sides, making it easier to service power connectors that are close to the edge because a tech can make the reach. “We tried to make the points where the power initially hit the wall closer to the edges so that you had access to the primary feed,” DiPaula explained.
DiPaula added that the display is slightly elevated from the floor to enable the museum’s cleaning crew to vacuum underneath it. That attention to the grittiest of gritty details mandated a solid working dynamic between all the disciplines involved in executing this project, DiPaula acknowledged. “It was a real team effort,” he said. “It was, 'Let’s work together to solve things.' And that was what made it a good experience.”