Technology West Group

The XI


The “XI Gallery” in New York’s Meatpacking District is home to a hybrid art installation. The most prominent work is a 33-ft wide model of Lower Manhattan. It is made of more than 10,000 miniature 3D-printed and hand-cut buildings. Known as The Egg, the artwork is brought to life with projection-mapping.

Es Devlin is the artist behind The Egg. She is renowned for her stage design for artists such as Beyoncé and Kanye West. She designed an Olympics closing ceremony, and most recently a projection-mapped story at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Devlin’s Manhattan is warped and fitted inside a quarter ovoid shape. It uses relative scaling tricks to force a unique perspective of the cityscape.

The Egg video system uses seven Barco F80-4K9 4K DLP laser projectors, fed by two genlocked Delta Infinity media servers, via HDBaseT extenders. Intricate alignment of each projector image relative to the model is accomplished using Delta’s ‘3D Calibration’ tool, combined critically with an accurate laser-scanned model of the built object.