Located in the heart of the Shanghai Expo Cultural Park, the Shanghai Greenhouse Garden features three themed pavilions—Coastal Sandbar, Cloud Forest, and Mist Canyon—each showcasing rare global flora and breathtaking natural landscapes. The Greenhouse Garden is Asia’s largest glass conservatory, known as the “City of Wild Plants.” Its latest night tour projection not only showcases the Garden’s natural wonders but also highlights exceptional projection capabilities designed and installed by Barco. The project seamlessly integrates projection systems with landscaping and creative content to produce a visual spectacle.

The highly irregular projection surfaces, featuring curved glass walls, trees, cacti, and rocky formations presented some very unique challenges for the team. This demanded extraordinary precision in color calibration and image alignment. 

Civil engineering, decoration, greenery, and multimedia projector setup were conducted simultaneously, increasing coordination difficulty and potential obstructions to the light path. In addition, projector placement required meticulous pre-visualization to avoid plant coverage, heat exposure, and to ensure stable mounting in all locations.

A total of forty-nine Barco G-series projectors brought the immersive storytelling to life across all three pavilions. The Coastal Sandbar Pavilion offers a captivating introduction to the immersive experience. “The Journey Begins” uses two G60-W7 projectors to immediately draw visitors into the story with meticulously designed visuals. As guests continue, “The Water Ritual” comes to life through four G62-W11 projectors, animating two massive baobab trees, the ground, and surrounding stone platforms with lively, playful imagery. 

The journey progresses into “The Pillar Jungle,” where two G62-W14 projectors cast dynamic lighting patterns onto three giant cacti, creating an interactive sound and light experience that responds to visitors as they pass by. The experience culminates with “The Starry Party,” which integrates sixteen G60-W7 projectors to create a fully immersive environment. This is where visitors can trigger interactive effects, such as flocks of butterflies and wings of light that gather at their touch—making the environment both magical and participatory.

In the Cloud Forest Pavilion, “Beauty in Harmony” employs five G100-W22 projectors to display vibrant scenes of rainforest life. These units provide 22,000 lumens of light using a single-chip laser phosphor projector with up-to-date input capabilities and future-proof design with full operational flexibility through a wide lens range. The projections feature lush flowers, hummingbirds, and lizards on uneven landscape surfaces, seamlessly intertwined with animations of robots and alien flora encountering a gorilla. The blend of natural and fantastical elements creates a rich, layered visual narrative. Additionally, “Passing Warmth” applies two G60-W7 projectors to illuminate an L-shaped fallen tree installation, illustrating the natural process of trees nurturing fungi as they grow into mushrooms.

The Misty Canyon Pavilion immerses visitors in a world of vibrant flora and fauna. “Flower Road Drift” uses nine G60-W7 projectors to light up a vivid petal pathway where lizards, frogs, and other small creatures appear and disappear beneath the blossoms. The projections blend seamlessly with surrounding floral pillars and scenic decoration, enveloping visitors in a dazzling ocean of blooms. “Floral Waterfall Drift” combines the power one G62-W11 and one G62-W14 projector to project a 10-meter-tall cascading image over a rock-face waterfall, merging the motion of real water with a mesmerizing stream of light. Finally, “Blooming Rebirth” features seven G100-W22 projectors forming a circular immersive space that revisits the adventurous journey of robots and alien plants through cinematic visuals, providing a memorable conclusion to the pavilion’s narrative.

This project showcases the unique charm of the Shanghai Greenhouse Garden while highlighting Barco’s exceptional projection capabilities in complex environments. In all, the project uses a total of 49 projectors to provide vivid color accuracy and rich detail to create an immersive 4K visual space. Low-noise operation ensures a serene and uninterrupted experience for the audience. 

Beyond delivering high-performance equipment, Barco provided flexible engineering expertise and tailored solutions, creating an experience that exceeded client expectations, enhanced the city’s cultural identity, and redefined the standards of nighttime cultural tourism.

For more information: 

Barco

G100-W22 

Shanghai Expo Cultural Park 

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