The Orb creates a spectacular experience for visitors entering Australia’s Adelaide Entertainment Centre. The iconic domed entry of the Adelaide Entertainment Centre has been completely transformed with a customised LED lighting installation engineered to deliver maximum visual impact.
Conceptualised by international lighting designer, Lighting Design Partnership (LDP), the Orb’s LED lighting installation was customised to meet the client’s brief that sought to create a commanding visual attraction, which would become the night-time identity of the Adelaide Entertainment Centre.
To achieve the sophisticated lighting effects, each of the Orb’s 140 ETFE pillows has been fitted with six Philips Color Kinetics ColorGraze Powercore linear colour-changing LED fixtures, with 30-degree or 60-degree beam-angle lensing. A DMX-based Philips Light System Manager controls the LED fixtures via an installation-wide Category 6 Ethernet communications loop. The Orb features over 800 LED lighting fixtures from Philips Lighting, providing more than 3500 individually controllable lighting addresses.
In addition to providing the Orb an impressive LED lighting solution, it was also important to ensure ground level illumination to allow safe movement of the crowds, in the event the feature LED lighting became non-operational.
Metal halide spotlights from Philips Selecon have been positioned above the entrance to the Adelaide Entertainment Centre with each spotlight precisely focused on one of six customised surface-mounted polished cellular mirrors to reflect the required amount of light to the ground beneath the Orb. This is achieved without impacting the Orb’s LED display or creating distracting levels of glare to the public below.
To ensure aesthetic consistency of the light source as well as make it unobtrusive, each LED fixture was fitted with a customised blinker to conceal it from the ground level.
Lighting Design Partnership Founding Director Andre Tammes notes that the pillows provide enormous scope for creativity, allowing them to showcase the lighting in an extremely dramatic and flamboyant way, and creating is very exuberant outcome.
