BlackTrax to Help Panasonic Wow Visitors at ISE 2018

The AV industry delivers few more compeling spectacles than projection mapping -- and at ISE 2018, real-time motion tracking company BlackTrax will once again be making a key contribution to what is expected to be yet another visual extravaganza on the Panasonic stand 1-H20, February 6 - 9, at Amsterdam's RAI.

"Panasonic's stand has long been a must-see at ISE as the company demonstrates what is possible when creative minds meet advanced technologies, so it's only natural that BlackTrax be included in our showstopper!" said Harmut Kulessa, European marketing manager at Panasonic.

Like last year, the showcase was designed by concept developer Painting with Light, a certified BlackTrax studio based in Belgium. It combines visual art performers, laser projection technology, 3D mapping and tracking, holographs, and projection -- "so that the lines between what is real and what is virtual will be impossible to distinguish," said Luc Peumans, CEO and creative director at Painting with Light.

BlackTrax is providing its tracking technology, with beacons attached to the fingers of the live performers. Information about the detailed movements of each performer is then passed to a disguise (formerly d3 Technologies) media server, which orchestrates lighting and video to ensure a cue-perfect performance.

"With BlackTrax, no-one misses a cue," said Marty Cochrane, BlackTrax product manager. "Even in the most complex, most demanding shows, everything is where it needs to be, on time, every time, without the possibility of human error."

BlackTrax is a vision-based system that connects to a range of third party applications, such as robotic lights, media servers, and any other third-party products that accept the RTTrPM open protocol. It can capture and pass positional 3D (X, Y, Z) and 6D rotation (yaw, pitch, roll) data to automation controllers. BlackTrax is acknowledged as the world's most stable and functional tracking product, and has been deployed in over 8,000 shows globally from the recent Queen + Adam Lambert tour through Cirque du Soleil and the Eurovision Song Contest to major product launches and live broadcast shows.

Demonstrating industry-wide acceptance, BlackTrax real-time motion tracking technology can be found at several technology partner stands such as Dataton WATCHOUT (12.E90) and L-ISA L-Acoustics (7-X220).