Birket Engineering Upgrades Galaxy Macau with Alcorn McBride V16X Show Controller and DVM8500 HD Video Players

Everyone who visits the Galaxy Macau casino resort on the Cotai Strip in Macau, China hopes that fortune will smile upon them. The glittering embodiment of the wish for good luck and prosperity is the Fortune Diamond, a gateway attraction offering a spectacular welcoming experience for guests.

Created by Entertainment Design Corporation (EDC) in Los Angeles, the fountain-based attraction is located in the Galaxy Macau hotel lobby. Every 20 minutes the roulette-shaped fountain, decorated with a stylized peacock feather motif, begins a stunning sound, light, and video show. Dancing waters rise and fall in time to music and colorful illuminations; video panels with changing imagery line the base of the fountain. The waters ultimately drop down to reveal a giant mirror-faceted diamond, which rises from inside the waterfall. The diamond spins and changes color before reclaiming its concealed position at the end of the show. The five-minute content is customized for Christmas and the Lunar New Year and has proved to be a popular photo op for Galaxy Macau guests.

The Fortune Diamond recently received a technology upgrade from Birket Engineering, which has been involved with the attraction since its initial installation more than a decade ago. Birket was tasked with replacing the show control, audio, and video systems and selected Alcorn McBride's V16X to drive the show and DVM8500 units for HD video playback.

"The Fortune Diamond is the first live show running on our new V16X show controller," says Alcorn McBride's chief innovation officer Scott Harkless. "Our products are all about synchronization, and this show locks together so many elements: lighting, the fountains, sound, video. The V16X supports more types of synchronization than our previous show controllers, and it takes communications to the next level with more interfaces for networking and software that pushes integration further than ever before."

Joe Fox, engineering manager for Birket at the time of the upgrade, likens the V16X to "the conductor of the Fortune Diamond symphony telling all the other orchestra members - audio, video, lighting - when to play their parts." He notes that, "the V16X builds on the history of Alcorn's V16 show controllers: proven technology that has been on the leading edge for the last 15 or 20 years. The V16X continues Alcorn's tradition of plug-and-play controllers; once you program them you don't have to think about them again. And it offers better PLC integration for other industry controls than previous systems."

Fox chose Alcorn's DVM8500 HD video players as a cost-effective solution to play back single channels of video displayed on the panels encircling the fountain. "They're bullet-proof video players for extremely high-profile projects," says Harkless. "The DVM8500s provide the robustness and reliability the Fortune Diamond requires for its daily schedule of shows."

Birket upgraded the user interface for the attraction's tech team moving them from a touch panel to a Surface tablet running Alcorn McBride's ShowTouch software. "The user interface is drastically smoother now and a lot prettier," says Fox.

The technology refresh was transparent to guests, Fox reports. "We completed the switchover during the course of one week testing the new systems at night. The Alcorn gear has run successfully ever since."