Immersive tasting experience, New York

Modulo Kinetic powers immersive tasting experience in New York’s Hall des Lumières

Bushmills, the world’s oldest licensed whiskey distillery, offers a one-of-a-kind whiskey tasting experience. With Bushmills’ Origins of Whiskey, the tasting of rare whiskeys blends in with an immersive environment transporting guests into the history and landscape of the Irish distillery.

A3 Visual was responsible for the technical production of the event that already stopped in New York and Chicago.

The very first experience was hosted on February 23-24 at the Hall des Lumières, a digital art center established in the former Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank and dedicated to immersive experiences. Designated as a New York City Landmark, the building offers a +11,500 square feet historical floor, completed by a 10,000 square feet modern floor.

For Bushmills’ Origins of Whiskey experience, guests could wander throughout a Hall des Lumières steeped in the Irish spirit thanks to state-of-the-art technology.  

The seated tasting session and main immersive show took place in the historical section of the building, with an immersive mapping on the Beaux-Arts style building and its delicate architecture.

Sean Mason, CEO of A3 Visual Immersive Division, explains: “The team of Hall des Lumières gave us a template and we worked with creative studio Spectre Lab who already created several exhibitions for the venue. There are +80 projectors on that floor, so that’s a massive template.”

On the ground floor, the 86 x G60 Barco projectors are powered by the Modulo Pi’s Modulo Kinetic media server used for projection mapping and to deliver a perfectly synchronized playback over the giant canvas. The kit is made of 2 x Modulo Kinetic Designer workstations connected to +20 x Modulo Kinetic V-Node servers.

The 45-minute show especially created for the Bushmills’ tasting experience was projected on walls and the floor of the imposing historical edifice. “We had 15 different scenes for the entire show, with an intro that played seamlessly to a loop. We worked with loops because we couldn’t have 45 minutes of content of that size” comments Sean Mason. “Using Modulo Kinetic, we were able to have a unique intro and then allow the content to loop without skipping.”

The first edition of Bushmills’ Origins of Whiskey was a tremendous success, with 200 whiskey lovers per show, and 4 shows a day.

Building on this success, a travel version of the experience was designed and presented in Chicago a few weeks later.