Augmented Reality Church?

This latest project may not precisely fit the definition of AR, but as far as ministries go it definitely gets points for boldness and effort in my book. This project was conceived by a ministry in our area and was put out for bidding to the community. A lot of heavy hitters put their system designs in the pot, so when our company was chosen to do the installation I was psyched.

The request was for the client church to be able to correctly light, mic and record each Sunday's message in HD, transport it in some form to a satellite campus (freshly renovated building made of solid brick) and play it back while mimicking the exact conditions of the original sermon with a secondary band and identical worship environment.

The main campus has a pretty high tech setup run by a program called Pro Presenter. As far as house of Worship Software goes I have yet to see anything more tailored to the cause.

We upgraded their original request for 50" TV's to 60" Plasma TV's to help ensure we were giving them what they wanted, and picked a screen size for the projector based on the height similar to that of the pastor with some leeway for filming on all sides. Widescreen was the obvious choice and we ended up with a 7'x16' "Da-Snap" screen from Da-Lite.

Using Key Digital Cat5e/6 Baluns, all we had to do was run a pair of Cat5e cables to each TV's install location and an electrician delivered dedicated power to us. Drilling through a foot and a half of cinder block and brick, we engineered a custom all-thread mounting solution for the TV wall mounts.

After installing all the frames and brackets, we had to wait for the rest of the renovation team to finish the stage and move out the heavy construction equipment. We weren't about to unroll a perfectly white $1400 piece of canvas just yet.

The projector we chose was a 5,500 lumen NEC projector with a lens purchased separately so we could ensure we were fitting the image exactly to the frame of the screen.  Below is a re-purposed ultra short throw projector mount that we rotated the fittings 180 degrees on in order to provide "as close to the wall" mounting of the projector as possible. Mimicking the location of the camera to the stage at the primary campus was a crucial part of the placement process.

Once the build team finished their work we were able to load in the big toys! After troubleshooting a few signal issues we were up and running within a day. One mac mini is dedicated to running the sermon through the NEC projector while a macbook pro is responsible for the pair of 60" TV's.

Mac Mini Control Station for Projector and Sermon delivery/storage.

Macbook Pro for Television control and mobile sermon design work.

We used a Key Digital 4x4 Matrix Switcher to mirror the TV's in hardware (much more reliable than software) and still have two ports leftover in case the campus ever decides to add TV's in the lobby/nursery/lounges or add any additional HDMI video sources (y'know, like an Xbox or sumthin')

In a wrapper is one of the Key Digital Cat5 video baluns we didn't end up using.  

 The Final Install!