Aug

Beijing Olympics Show

August 9, 2008 · Filed Under Technology · 198 views

The Amazing Historic Scroll

If you watched yesterdays opening of the Beijing Olympics, you won’t be disappointed with the light shows and the artistic presentations. If I can personally applaud the overall creative director of the show, I’ll applaud him and all the people who in one way or another contributed to that wonderful presentation to the world, and the thousands of participants which to me is a logistics nightmare. What especially send chills down my spine was watching the Giant Sky Footprints timed and properly aligned towards the Birds Nest Stadium. Well you have to find a copy of the show to appreciate it your self.

If you are the kind of person like me, you would probably think right now how they made the Amazing scroll on the walls and the floor of the stadium, Or why are the fireworks properly timed. Everything is synced including the lights and sound. The only glitch I found was when on the actual lighting of the torch, the final runner running at the walls of the stadium was running, errrr, floating faster than the graphic background. (I think it’s the crane operators fault). Also, when he started to light the final giant torch, it took him a while to ignite it.

The Fireworks at the Birds Nest Stadium

Here is the how:

The Magic Scroll. It is actually made by 44,000 LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes, similar to some mobile phone screens) with a distance of 600mm between each two, measuring 482 feet by 22 meters wide appearing and unrolling like a huge scroll on the center of the stadium grounds detailing China’s 5,000-year civilization and their contribution to the world like paper and ink, the press and the likes.

The Man Power, keeping them together. Over 18,000 artists/performers are in the show, each of them have identification codes to keep track of them using sophisticated technical monitoring systems, no Olympic Event has ever used this technology.

The Fireworks. According to Cai Guoqiang, the person behind the fireworks display, they used digital ignition control system for the fireworks to coordinate and time their fire in over 30 locations across Beijing. All 40,000 of them fired up without a single hitch.

The Paper Used. China’s aerospace sector provided the material used for the paper on the painting scroll.

Now let’s see if the next Olympics can top that.

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