MODULAR LED HISTORY Part Seven

In a bar in Hong Kong in 1999 Frederic Opsomer and I mapped out the future of the LED industry. There were napkin sketches. Tragically none of these survived. We imagined an LED market full of creative products and sets composed of various types of LED. I think I described something that would evolve into VersaTILE a few years later. A desire to push low res LED in a different direction as more of a material. This was a lot less obvious than it might seem. Manufacturers were laser focused on shifting to higher and higher resolution. A few years later I would get together with a bunch of like minded people (Chris, Claas, Jeremy, Marian, and Nils) to found Element Labs. But that is a story for another time. Today we are going to look at the evolution of the LED display industry as reflected in one man’s journey from carrying bulky televisions around discos for a Belgian rental house to designing the mechanical system for PRG that would allow U2 to tour Joshua Tree with a massive wall of ROE CB8. 

There are several links in the body this article. Some of the stories are very well covered and if you are interested the links are there. There is some crossover with an article that Jerry Gilbert wrote for Lighting & Sound (PLASA) in 2016. You might not remember it because it was before Covid-19 so here is the link to that article which also features a nice although not exactly comprehensive or entirely correct section on Element Labs. Again, a story for another time.

THE PRELUDE

Luck favors the prepared. Let us set the scene. A young Frederic Opsomer is working for Video Image Processing (VIP), the Belgian rental house mentioned above. He had started out dragging large CRT monitors into discos to do marketing for cigarette companies and moved up through the company. VIP eventually purchases a Philips Vidiwall system and VIP is doing work on auto shows for brands like Peugeot and Renault. Philips was at the time a large diversified electronics company that also owned Polygram Records and Polygram had a band called U2 and U2 had a designer named Willie Williams and Willie had big plans. And those plans did not include the Philips Nitstar (an LCD based outdoor screen with a nickname that ended in -itstar) and so now everyone needed to find an alternative video display to use on the European leg of ZooTV where the GE Talaria video projectors being used in the United States were not going to work in the extended daylight hours of European summer. Frederic said that VIP turned around a quick mockup with Barco and that U2 quickly made the decision to go with VIP and the as yet not designed Digiwall. 

“We brought them to Barco the next day and they saw our first attempt of a cube which was really a tin can.” Two days later the band had confirmed with VIP and “we had three months to develop a rigging cube”. There were a number of problems that needed to be addressed. First, nobody was touring projection cubes at this point in time in any meaningful way. Second, When you installed a projection cube it worked best if you never touched it again. Third, this was a massive surface that would eventually fill seven trucks.

The resulting product looks more like the Electrosonic Procube than any of the Japanese projection cubes (Pioneer and Toshiba). It is a generally featureless box with a screen on the end the light comes out and input and projection electronics on the other side. The boxiness likely simplified the design and that was a necessity given the amount of time.

You can clearly see the center load point in the image above based on the mechanical fasteners on the sides and the two rigging points at the top. You can also see four alignment pins at the corners. The nice thing about projection cubes is they are a giant waste of space because they are mostly full of air. There is a lot room around the projector to wrap the structural components. And if it were not for the impending arrival of higher resolution LED products it is likely that this approach would have been improved upon iteratively to reduce the depth, reduce the weight, and make the projection engine and the signal distribution system more robust.

So why was Frederic prepared? What made VIP the right company? “If I go back from the very early days when we were carrying television sets in disco clubs. Those god damn things were not meant to be carried in disco clubs. So what did we do? We started with putting special profiles, special handles, ... in 1985 it was already about how do you make things transportable and easy to handle” As a company there were people within VIP that were prepared to think about a video display in terms of how it could be adapted to the work that was required. And this adaptability was critical to delivering the equipment on this tour.

Another reason that ZooTV is fascinating in the context of these articles is because the technical and tour documentation does not appear to exist on the internet. The articles that would have appeared in Light & Sound or Entertainment Design or some other industry magazine do not appear to have made it online. You can now typically find an article with at least a gratuitous list of hardware and the names of the crew people. In light of that here are some very incomplete credits for the tour (Including arbitrary hellos to friends): Production designer & director Willie Williams, Architect Mark Fisher, Tour director Jake Kennedy, Production director Stephen Iredale, Project manager Richard Hartman, Video engineer Dave Lemmink, Video programming Jim Vastola, Lighting of all birds John Lobel, and somewhere pushing a case Tim Halle. Frederic Opsomer and some of the VIP crew also obviously playing a big role day to day.

Last week I mentioned the substantial impact of x-Barco employees on the LED industry. Once the ZooTV tour was over some staff at VIP started to look at other opportunities. System Technologies was founded by Frederic after he left VIP in 1995 and XL Video was founded by Rene and Marcel DeKeyzer in1996. These are the last two ingredients in the global Belgian LED mafia.

PHASE ONE - 700% the screen in 29% of the trucks

This is the story of the design and realization of the U2 PopMart tour. The timing of this design makes it an important moment in the development of modular LED displays. Versions of this story are available in many places (like here). Willie Williams and Mark Fisher conceived of a massive LED screen for the next U2 show at some point early in the summer of 1996. The timing was good for LED but not great. Companies had started to produce full color LED video screens at the time (Invision Microsystems, Opto Tech, QSTECH, and Sunrise) but there was not a company that was actively manufacturing screens at this scale. In fact 1996 was probably the first year in history that more than one company was producing a full color LED display. Some companies at this time could not supply a true green LED package. And the majority of LED signal distribution was either direct DC voltage or short TTL runs and neither of these approaches in combination with ribbon cable lent itself well to a large distributed system.

A number of tests were conducted including one at Brilliant Stages in the UK. Willie Williams has provided some video and describes the test as "showing what is very likely the world’s first lo-res LED video screen prototype. This is hanging up at Brilliant Stages' old place out at Greenford and consists of some LED ‘pixels’ attached to cable ribbon and spaced a very ambitious 9” apart, or thereabouts. You can see that we demoed it during the day which was equally ambitious but, hey, we had high hopes. The massive pile of PC hardware and rats’ nest of cables to the rear was our ‘media server’. I was there with Mark Fisher and Richard Hartman, as well as Jake Kennedy, U2’s then production manager, who you see run through the shot."

Notes on the video - The hand in the video on the LED net likely belongs to Richard Hartman. The tech waving towards the end of the video is Tam Bailey, the designer of the screen.

In November 1996 this became an R&D project with Frederic. Frederic now needed to identify a partner for the electronics and design a system that would fit in two trucks, protect the electronics, and load in and out smoothly. It is worth noting that there was no internet and that global GSM mobile phone accessibility was still something of a new thing. Frederic had done some research and lined up some places to visit. There were probably fax machines involved. Frederic first visited Opto Tech in Taiwan. Opto had an LED cluster that they were using or planning to use in stadium installs. But Opto are an engineering driven company. They have an incredible store of knowledge about LED display panel design but at their core are cautious. This would have been far outside of their comfort zone at the time. The next stop was Panasonic who also had an LED cluster along with a visit to another possible partner in Osaka. The company in Osaka was producing LED modules with an eye on the advertising market. Frederic was not convinced that any of these companies would make the right partner. He eventually landed at Saco in Montreal via a referral from a possible vendor in New York. 

Fred Jalbout, one of the founders of Saco, could be forgiven for assuming that the Belgian man visiting his office was wasting his time when he sent Frederic off to the airport with a signed letter giving System Technology exclusivity for a tour by a band whose name Fred Jalbout had not recognized. That impression changed when Frederic returned in ten days with Willie Williams, Mark Fisher, Richard Hartman, Jake Kennedy, and a few other people. By the time they left Saco had been selected to supply the LED systems for a screen produced by System Technologies. The opening date of the tour was in April 1997 in Las Vegas. This allowed for less than six months for design, sourcing, manufacturing, assembly, and delivery to Las Vegas … followed by more assembly. 

The design is straightforward. A lot of thought went into how to engineer frames that would fanfold into place show after show while maintaining alignment and protecting the electronics in transit. There was no template for how to build this screen. The design utilized aluminum slats (referred to as tubes on the tour) that were mounted on frames that hinged together so that the whole screen folded up. The system rolled in on set carts and they got the install time down to three hours. Each panel in the system had a frame that supported the LED strips and some control electronics and connected to the adjacent frames in the system. 

You can see the detail above of the eight DIP LED packages poking through the aluminum profile. These would eventually be potted or repotting during the tour because this is the process of designing the bicycle while ridding it in traffic. In the context of the earlier article on Invision Microsystems it is interesting to see two blue LEDs with the three red LEDs and three green LEDs. One of the reasons that a person could look at the red/green screen and think that it was making white is that the human eye is a relativistic device and what it defines as white covers a broad range including a very warm almost yellow glow. It does not take much blue to push that back into a more neutral white.

Another one of the complexities of this entire project is that the process of content development for this tour predates any modern or even Mesozoic previz system. Frederic described a visit by Willie Williams to System Technologies where they "had to go way back in the field between the cow shed" to be the right distance away to see a 4 meter x 4 meter chunk of screen. The actual screen was so large that it was only ever assembled fully at rehearsals in Las Vegas and it worked. The creative team likely did not see a larger chunk of screen until they arrived in Las Vegas.

Some incomplete credits for the tour (Including arbitrary hellos to friends): Show design & direction Willie Williams, Architect Mark Fisher, Screen imagery by: Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, Run Wrake, Leigh Bowery, John Maybury, Jennifer Steinkamp, Vegetable Vision, Straw Donkey, Curator of screen imagery Catherine Owens, Tour director Jake Kennedy | Holly Peters, assistant, Production director Stephen Iredale, Production manager Clifford N. Levitt David Herbert, assistant, Pre-production Project Manager Richard Hartman, Lighting Design Willie Williams, Sound designers Joe O'Herlihy, Lighting director Bruce Ramus, Lighting consultant Allen Branton, Icon operator Tom Thompson, Tour camera director Monica Caston, Media engine software design Dave Lemmink, Assistant engineer and a man now looking for a new place to do cool things Stefaan Desmedt, Ropeoplogist John Lobel.

The PopMart tour established LED at the center of concert touring. And yet it still took many years several waves of manufacturers to make that happen. Frederic would go on to work on some other products with Saco such as the 18 mm screen that Dave Crump would purchase for Screenco to use on the Janet Jackson Velvet Rope tour. System Technologies also delivered a heart shaped LED floor for Celine Dion' Let's Talk About Love tour.

PHASE TWO - LED Panels are a business

In 1999 Frederic was doing some work for Hibino on the Tokyo Motor Show when he had a conversation with Graham Andrews (Creative Technology). Graham suggested that Frederic go talk to Tony Van de Ven at Lighthouse in Hong Kong. Creative Technology had recently been one of the first companies to purchase the Lighthouse 102C 10 mm SMD panels and the frames were truly horrible.

One very expensive one-way plane ticket later and Frederic was in Hong Kong to meet with Tony. Lighthouse was on the verge of a very good run of sales as they had no real competition at this point and the Lighthouse 102C was far more capable, at what I think was 400 nits, than any of the rental companies had thought it would be. The mechanical design was a problem but it was a problem that fit within Lighthouse's cost structure. The Lighthouse panels were perhaps the first LED display panels exported out of Shenzhen to western rental companies. The panels were manufactured at Desay and according to Tony he could get a frame in Shenzhen at that point for two-hundred and fifty dollars. This was far cheaper than the frames Frederic was currently producing in Belgium and Frederic understood the effect that would have. He would eventually stick an entire brake form shop in shipping containers and send it to Shenzhen so that Lighthouse could start to build their own frames.

Lighthouse replaced the 102C with the 102D (pictured) and the product went on to be very successful. It is a completely recognizable folded metal box with a central rigging pin and a pair of guide pins and cam-locks to side to side connection. There was access to the modules and the power supply from the back.

This work for Lighthouse led to work for Toshiba and other companies in addition to the work Frederic was already doing for Hibino. When Toshiba moved to 6 mm the frames shifted to aluminum extrusions and System Technologies had to introduce CNC milling to get to the required tolerances. In some ways this work had more impact on the market than PopMart. The shift to brake form and eventually aluminum extrusion (typically housed in thin sheet metal shells) created an identifiable model that could be emulated. You could see what System Technologies was doing and copy it. And other people could improve on that. Copying PopMart only made sense if you were trying to do the PopMart tour (see Westerhagen Screen). And that crew had already nailed that. But if you paid attention to what System Technologies and eventually Lighthouse were doing you could quantify exactly what customers expected in an LED rental product and you could build a design around that. So in effect Graham Andrews pointing Frederic Opsomer to Tony Van de Ven helped created an industry consensus around what the commodity LED market was going to be. You could now make a box and a customer would look at it and think "that is an LED panel".

CONCLUSION

As I noted at the beginning of the article Frederic is still working on massive LED projects. The PRG Spaceframe for the ROE CB8 on the U2 Joshua Tree tour is not that different a mechanical challenge to PopMart. Different technology and a different solution. We have only covered the first couple years in this article. The work on distributed LED systems and products like MiSPHERE and FLX will be covered in another article.

System Technologies would become independent again in 2001 and then sell itself off to Barco in 2005. Frederic now works at PRG running the PRG Projects group where he is pondering Real Reality as a counterpoint to Augmented/Mixed/Extended Reality. He is thinking of the RR that will follow the XR. How do we recover from this as an industry? When will audiences feel that it is now OK to be back in a crowd?

Thank you to Frederic Opsomer and Willie Williams for assistances with this article. The copyright for the images and the video are retained by their original owners and any use outside the context of this article would be frowned upon.

And finally a link to a video that Tom Mudd posted featuring Arthur Jackson talking about Invision Microsystems from 1997.