Of many impressive technical elements on the four Olympic Games Opening and Closing Ceremonies this summer, arguably the one most capturing the public imagination was the 70 500 Pixel Tablets installed at each seat.

These Pixel Tablets were all individually driven and so collectively acted as one giant video surface.
The person at the centre of development was Tait Technologies’ Frederic Opsomer, based at their European HQ in Belgium. Opsomer has a history of designing and engineering weird, wonderful and left-field LED and video projects.

The idea was first discussed in 2009. At that stage the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and everyone involved was talking in broad and general terms about integration and LED, resulting in Opsomer being one of the people asked to go to London…and think “out of the box’.

A few months later, several proposals from different companies were on the table, from which the Tait Technologies solution was selected.
Having a temporary (ie. removable) pixel display on each seat instead of the field of play offered many aesthetic and practical advantages.

The 135mm square units each contained 9 pixels (Nichia LEDs) at a 50mm pitch. Based on the Barco FLX platform, they utilised Barco’s already proven processing and control hubs. Having helped develop the FLX product while working at Barco, Opsomer knew it was extremely stable and would be robust enough for the job.
A Pixel Tablet and its accompanying holder – also part of the design brief – was attached to the profile of each of the 70 500 seats in the Olympic Stadium.

Processing wise, the stadium was divided into 50mm sections via a virtual grid, and the tablets were positioned in the seating sections, filling up this part of the grid.
Video content for the four ceremonies was primarily designed and created out of the London office of Crystal CG from China, and stored and played back via a customised AI Infinity server from Avolites Media. The 3D model of the stadium was imported into the server and various content was mapped to the pixels.

The first major challenge in manufacturing the Pixel Tablets was the short lead time between January when the contract was confirmed with Tait and the final Pixel Tablet design produced, and the product to be delivered on site in Stratford by the end of May.
They had to be completely confident that all decisions taken in rapid succession were the right ones, and working with the Barco backbone certainly helped this process.

The components were manufactured in China and the final assembly was completed in Belgium.
EMC was a massive issue, with the chances of picking it up on an installation of this scale very high, so every single component was rigorously laboratory tested to ensure all were compliant. This was undertaken in a lab close to Brussels over a two-month period, which is extremely fast in terms of any product development!
The third big test was the logistics of the installation. With the perimeter of the top row of seats in the stadium measuring 950 metres, plenty of time is consumed just moving around the space, so efficient and practical planning and implementation of the works was crucial.

Tait supplied a dedicated crew of 12 Pixel technicians to work on the ceremonies, with five permanently stationed at the stadium for the duration of the Games.
As the world saw … the installation was another massive success for Tait Technologies – most definitely “a company to watch’.