Super Bowl Spectacular: Transforming the Caesars Palace facade with Screenberry

bluemedia and Omnispace360 relied on Screenberry to power a giant projection mapping show that lit up the Las Vegas Strip nightly during Super Bowl LVIII week.

Nestled between Bellagio and The Mirage, Caesars Palace stands as one of the city's most prominent landmarks. Inspired by ancient Roman architecture, this hotel-casino, built in 1966, boasts a facade adorned with columns and pilasters, lavish marble interiors, and an array of Greek and Roman statues, all designed to immerse visitors in the opulence of the Roman Empire. It’s no wonder that Caesars Palace’s Augustus Tower with its facade was chosen to serve as a canvas for the Super Bowl’s projection mapping show, as it offers excellent visibility from the wide pedestrian area around the famous Bellagio fountains.

To bring the Super Bowl Spectacular show to life, bluemedia and Omnispace360 faced the challenge of dealing with the extremely high ambient light levels of the Las Vegas Strip, considered one of the brightest spots on Earth. To overcome the bright surroundings, the team opted for 42 x Barco UDX-4K40 projectors throwing an impressive 1.7 million lumens onto the carefully wrapped 65,000-square-foot (6,039 sq m) facade of the hotel. The projectors were organized in eight stacks and positioned on three platforms on the adjacent rooftops.

At the core of the setup was a single Screenberry Atlas x8 media server, which was responsible for driving and aligning this expansive projector array. An additional media server was running as a backup. Screenberry also managed the audio output for the show.

The key to achieving such impressive results was Screenberry's advanced 3D Scene technology, which offers tools for precise content mapping and alignment on intricate 3D shapes like Caesars Palace. By utilizing a detailed digital model of the building and employing pose estimation algorithms, the software finely adjusted the position, orientation, throw ratio, and lens shift of the virtual projectors to perfectly match the physical ones. This technique allowed for merging all projectors into a seamless image and mapping the building with pixel-perfect precision. It also helped to optimize the setup time.

The three-and-a-half-minute Super Bowl Spectacular portrayed American football players as Roman gladiators battling for the Lombardi Trophy. Running nightly during Super Bowl week, the projection show attracted large crowds and garnered extensive coverage on social media and TV networks. It could be seen in wide shots from CBS’s broadcasting stage and in helicopter overviews during the game.