Christie Spyder X20 at New Fifth Avenue Hollister Store

"Surf's up!" is not what you expect to hear on New York City's Fifth Avenue, but the recently-opened midtown Manhattan Hollister store features a live video feed of surfers in Huntington Beach, California with the help of two Christie Spyder X20-0808 video processors and a Christie URS universal routing switcher. Hollister, the Southern California teen-inspired lifestyle brand from Abercrombie & Fitch, launched its second Manhattan store with its double-height glass storefront highlighting a surf motif. The company erected a giant wall consisting of 169 46-inch LCD displays stretching across the façade and over the front door.

"The monitors are mounted in portrait mode with virtually no mullions (vertical columns between the monitors) and offer a total pixel count of 7290 x 3360," said Jeff Anderson, of G-Force Engineering LLC, project integrator. "Two HD cameras in Huntington Beach feed live content to the video walls and are stitched together to spread a single image of the surf and surfers across the wall. We opted for dual cameras with a 15-percent screen overlap and resolution that is close to 4K.

"By adjusting the output in DVI format and pixel mapping to the monitor resolution we achieved a seamless integration between the Spyder X20s. We also utilized additional outputs to create monitoring feeds for the equipment room and in the store."

Thanks to Spyder X20's ability to blend multiple images together seamlessly, the signals from Huntington Beach can arrive separately with the Spyder X20 managing the blending and stitching. "If we lose a feed, we have the ability to stretch a single camera across the wall," Anderson added. "The image quality the Spyder X20 provides is second to none. We looked at other processors, but the Christie product is the industry benchmark. That's why we went with it."

Inside the Hollister store, five additional video walls continue the illusion that shoppers are "in a shop on the Huntington Beach pier," Anderson said. "The monitor walls are set up to look like windows, so where you look determines what you see - the right side of the pier, the left side of the pier, or the ocean and surfers coming straight toward you."

The in-store video walls feature 40" and 52" LCD displays with mullions. "We place architectural elements over the mullions to make the video walls look like windows and the mullions like frames," Anderson explained. The five walls include a 3 x 5 configuration with 52" monitors in the denim area, a 13 x 2 in the stairwell, 2 x 3 configurations at the north wall and south wall, and a 2 x 6 cash register wall. The in-store walls are routed from a single URS-0808; dual cameras with a 15-percent image overlap feed the three west-facing walls.

"Both the Spyder X20 and URS are very intuitive and the Christie staff helped us maximize each model's capabilities for our needs," Anderson concludes. "It was a pleasure to work with the director of application engineering, Victor Vettorello - he helped make set-up easier than we expected."