The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. recently completed a $100M beautification project on Liberty Island – the centerpiece of which was construction of the new Statue of Liberty Museum. The five-year project entailed close collaboration with the National Park Service/U.S. Department of the Interior to design and construct the 26,000-square-foot museum, whose stone-and-glass construction embraces modern design while seamlessly blending with the island’s timeless beauty.
Exhibit designer ESI Design brought in AV integrator Diversified to design and implement the museum’s extensive AV network. Diversified project manager Carol Feeley-Vario commented on how the museum’s location heavily influenced her firm’s approach to the project, “While Liberty Island may appear as if it’s just a stone’s throw away from New York City, we needed to bear in mind the practical remoteness of the site. Any service visit would require working within the parameters of ferry schedules and visitation hours – which is why we went to great lengths to build redundancies into the system that would all but eliminate the need to conduct repairs on-site.”
With network reliability as a top priority, Diversified deployed more than 80 BrightSign media players at various points in the museum. And while BrightSign’s hardware is responsible for distributing content to dozens of displays throughout the museum, perhaps the most critical role BrightSign plays in the museum is that of fail-over. The robust yet affordable players are at the heart of every single experience, from simple to complex, serving as the fail-over for each.
“We have BrightSign media players serving as back-ups to the primary servers, and in some cases even as secondary back-ups to the back-up servers. In short, we’re relying heavily on BrightSign to keep all the exhibits up and running in the unlikely event of a network failure. You can say BrightSign is the final ‘torch’ that would keep the museum’s exhibit content streams flowing in the case of any sort of disruption,” continued Feeley-Vario.
The museum’s AV network involves three primary areas – an immersive theater, an artifact gallery and an interactive kiosk exhibit.
The immersive theater is separated into three nodes, each of which utilizes multiple projectors being fed video content from BrightSign XD media players. Content is projected on multiple screens, the largest of which is 18 feet tall by 40 feet wide. One set of BrightSign players serves as a primary content distribution hub, while a second set serves as a fail-over in the event that the primary distribution system suffers an outage or other disruption.
The artifact gallery includes a mix of authentic and reproduction artifacts that help tell the story of the statue’s construction, and give a visual depiction of how the Statue of Liberty has become deeply intertwined with the cultural history of the United States. The artifact gallery features an impressive mosaic of displays, powered by BrightSign. The mosaic utilizes a number of screens with unconventional aspect ratios that would normally have required custom engineering to display properly. However, the BrightSign XD media players support a near-limitless array of aspect ratios, ensuring that the content displays perfectly – no custom engineering required.
The third space within the museum is a large exhibit featuring 20 touch-interactive kiosks that invite visitors to answer questions about themselves, take selfies and then ‘push’ their personalized content to a massive LED wall. BrightSign hardware serves as the fail-over for the entire exhibit, as well as the primary distribution point for all content displayed on the LED wall.
Feeley-Vario concluded, “We needed distribution hardware capable of displaying 4K content, which the BrightSign hardware handles with ease. But beyond that technical requirement, we needed the peace of mind to know that our remote AV network would perform flawlessly without any downtime. BrightSign’s reliability is unrivaled in the industry, and that was a key driver of the Diversified team’s decision to entrust such a high-visibility project to BrightSign’s players.”
