Projector ideas for dance floor

[spikespiegal]

Friend of mine who owns a small nightclub has been bugging me for ideas to 'jazz up' his dance floor with some modern effects. After sitting there and watching customers for a couple of nights, along with the aid of a few, ahem, beverages, I think I have an idea but need to bounce it off people with more projector experience. I'm sure this has been done before.

His club has pretty high ceilings, so my idea is to run a drop down ceiling about 8-9' feet above the dance floor. I'd use very fine cabling to reduce shadows. Drop ceiling would be composed of translucent tiles, texture and density to be determined yet. A projector would be mounted vertically to the ceiling and project onto the grid. Essentially we have an 'open' rear projection TV mounted horizontally above a dance floor.

From this we can feed all manner of AV material including Media Player plugins, etc.

One thing that would make this easy to do is we could test the whole rig, including different types of tiles in a horizontal position ahead of time to work out any spacing bugs. Still, I'd like some thoughts on this entire screwball project before commiting to it. Would a typical projector be bright enough when used in such a fashion, etc.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

How big is the final image supposed to be and what kind of light conditions are in the club? I think those are going to be your two biggest enemies to making it look decent. When you say pretty high ceilings... how much room are you talking about between this 8'-9' new drop down ceiling and the actual ceiling above it? (essentially the projector's estimated throw)

 

[Quasmo]

You can always use a mirror mounted at a 45 degree angle. You're going to want to use a bright projector (Atleast 2500 lumens), and I'd go with a 4x3 aspect ratio. Something like this. I'd say mount the projector upside down on the actual ceiling, pointed at a mirror, and then point it at the drop ceiling, this way you'll get a larger image. What you might want to use for tiles is try the frosted tiles that are used for the flouresant lights.

 

[Rubycon]

2000 lumens will suffice if it's dark and/or your target (ceiling) has some focusing ability. For example if you don't mind a sharp cutoff you can use fresnel panels like they use in projection TV's. From the side of the floor it will look subtle but bystanders will notice projected images on dancers, etc.

If your target is similar to a bedsheet you may want to step up the output to 4000-6000+ lumens which increases the price considerably. Reverse PJ is neat because it gives you virtually unlimited options of color and patterns affordably compared to a ring of roboheads which will cost $100's of thousands easily.

 

[spikespiegal]

Hi guys, thanks for the tips. So far, I'm on track with most of the advice.

For a final projection size I'd like an image around 6' x 8'. Initially this seemed small, but I stood under a typical drop ceiling and 'visualized' how many tiles it would take to produce the effect I wanted while being on the dance floor. It was then easy to conclude the screen size.

Obviously this has distance/throw requirements, and I've yet to measure the ceiling for clearence. I also thought of the (front surface) mirror option in the event I didn't have enough room and might have to resort to this. Short throw lenses aren't cheap, and I would prefer to have a projector with a short throw already on it, but this drastically limits my choices.

Rubycon, you read my mind. I plan on using some type of lenticular or fresnel tile to focus the light onto the dancers immediatley below the screen for maximum intensity. Depending on how bright it is, there a possibility I could leave a couple tiles open and put a couple of cheap robos there to add effect.

The cool thing is I can test most of this on the floor in a horizontal position to check brightness, tile types, room brightness levels, etc. This way there are no dissapointments when it's mounted because we've worked out the major bugs.