Immersive DaVinci

Since the end of January, Berlin has been enriched by an extraordinary exhibition. The Genius Immersive Experience is all about the universal genius Leonardo DaVinci. Offering visitors an interpretation of how DaVinci would see and interact with our world today, the exhibition is designed as an immersive, interactive art experience. The immersive sound element is provided by a d&b Soundscape system.

Genius Immersive Experience transports visitors into DaVinci’s world of thought; both the images and the soundtrack move with the exhibit. Sound and projection merge to create a multimedia exhibition in which visitors can immerse themselves completely.

The experience was realised by, among others, the organiser BIG Borealis and the design studio flora&faunavisions. d&b partner Amptec, a leading provider of professional audio solutions based in Belgium, was responsible for providing the audio equipment and installing the d&b Soundscape system.

One of d&b’s most cutting-edge technologies, the d&b Soundscape is a scalable, high-resolution platform. It enables the user to create immersive experiences, helping them to bring new dimensions to creativity in sound and performance. Its En-Scene software enables object based mixing while its En-Space software is a premium, plug and play acoustic emulation software based on sophisticated acoustic signatures of some of the world’s leading performance venues.

For this setup, Amptec installed 32 10S-D loudspeakers, mounted in a ring above the huge screens throughout the room. In addition, six 18A and one 21S subwoofers were placed at the centre. At the cube in the centre of the large hall, in addition Amptec installed three 8S loudspeakers on the outside and two 8S inside the cube.

“To achieve a perfect result, we had to keep an exact distance between the speakers and a precisely calculated angulation,” says Frank Geerts, Business Unit Manager PA & Theatre at Amptec. “This precision allowed us to create a perfect immersive experience that allows the visitors to directly interact with this stunning environment, addressing all their senses.”

The technical team at Amptec managed by Steven Aerts programmed the DS100 signal engine and created various presets. The Soundscape system is designed in such a way that it can easily be reproduced in other locations, a crucial requirement as the show will be visiting other countries around the world. “To my knowledge, this approach is pretty unique, as immersive show concepts are usually only ever designed for a single venue. By coming up with this model [using Soundscape], the end user is able to simply deploy the original concept to any venue,” Geerts adds.

The DS100 Signal Engine from d&b audiotechnik sits at the heart of the Soundscape system. The network, and Dante-enabled DSP platform, can manage 64 inputs and outputs in parallel and takes care of the distribution of the individual audio tracks. In addition to the DS100 three DS10 Audio Network Bridges are used for the Genius system design, which serve as an interface between the Dante network and digital AES3 audio signals.

The seamless interaction of d&b loudspeakers, processors, matrices, the audio files and the right installation made this interactive and immersive experience possible.

“When we went looking for a sound system a year ago, we were immediately impressed with the d&b Soundscape and its capabilities. It was a perfect fit for our show concept, because we wanted a complete immersive experience for our show here, not only visually — but also audio-wise,” concludes Alfonso Losco, the technical director of the Borealis Interactive Group. 

Genius DaVinci will be in Berlin until 31st July 2022 and the innovative multimedia exhibition will be on show in 12 other locations in Europe and the USA until 2025.