Meet the tech providers behind Vivid

Sydney’s annual light and music festival Vivid opened to the public on Friday night. The event - which brings technology and art together - runs for three weeks in locations across Sydney Harbour, the CBD and the inner city.

Every year, Vivid organiser Destination NSW goes to tender for both artists and IT providers to seek expressions of interest.

CRN spoke to Michael Hassett, the chief executive of one of the technical providers, TDC. The Sydney and Melbourne-based video technology solutions company has supplied the hardware and technical direction for some of the biggest Vivid light installations over the last five years.

This year, TDC’s work will be on display at nine locations. One of the displays TDC put together this year is the “first-ever multi-viewer augmented reality activation” using Huawei tablet technology for the projection at Customs House.

                                                      Customs House

Another installation called Eyes on the Harbour at Cockle Bay will capture audience’s faces and project them onto a “water screen” created with 56 fountains and 22 flame jets using Intel RealSense scanning technology.

Other TDC sites include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cadmans Cottage, Sydney Harbour Bridge Pylons, Taronga Zoo Centenary Celebrations, Central Park, Amp Building, The Royal Botanic Garden and Darling Harbour.

TDC employs 35 staff to work on Vivid to produce 11,500 square metres of video projection using over 70 projectors.

Royal Botanic Gardens

"Towards the end of the year, Vivid puts out an expression of interest, broken up into two components. One is for creative content, which is generally pitched at lighting designers, graphic artists, design companies, and ask them what they’d like to do," said Hassett.

"The other part is the technical element. We respond to the expression of interest saying we want to take care of x number of buildings, the tech, and infrastructure and managing that site.

“Vivid selects the creative components and we put them together. We then gather the information like what resolution, bitrate, and codecs they need to provide for the hardware. About two to three months out, we receive the test content to put on our systems and make sure it's suitable for the way we’ve designed the projects.”

TDC sets up a tower-like structure for each instalment which can be controlled remotely from any device. Each structure houses video projects, power distribution, and media servers from d3 Technologies.

Taronga Zoo

Each structure is also equipped with a Netgear router with 4G Telstra access, allowing TDC to remotely control each display from any device, along with a video camera to monitor the site.

“One of the main reasons we went with remote operations was that we learnt from having a large number of projects that having less people, we have less movement. There’s not as much chance of lights becoming misaligned if people don’t have to go up and turn everything on themselves.”

Museum of Contemporary Art

Hassett said that the biggest challenge for its IT systems was humidity: “It’s difficult to go out and find a remote switching system to turn on three-phase heaters and fan systems.”

Vivid runs every night in Sydney until 18 June.