"Advertise coffee in the morning and cable TV at night. Advertise ice cream in the summer and instant hot soup in the winter. Advertise umbrellas when it rains and board-shorts when the sun shines. Mix advertising, information, news and community messaging, keeping your impact value at maximum."

-- Barco Media Ad

Because you're usually too busy gambling (or driving around town looking at the nifty signs), you probably don't know that a major complaint of Las Vegas visitors -- especially women -- is that there isn't any place to seriously shop. This is because the town's pitch is casino tables -- not chic boutiques.

This is changing. It first changed when Caesars Palace opened its haute-couture collection of Forum Shops -- 100-plus shops with nametags ranging from Christian Dior to Banana Republic. And, the Las Vegas shopping atmosphere popped even further last summer when The Rouse Co. (Columbia, MD) announced its redevelopment of the Fashion Show, a mall at Las Vegas Blvd. and Spring Mountain Rd., just north of McCarran Intl. Airport.

An artist's rendering (photos of completed work are on the following pages) depicts Fashion Show spectaculars, a Las Vegas technical-signage spectacle soon appearing at the redeveloped Fashion Show mall, north of McCarran Intl. Airport. Entryway displays incorporate moveable LEDs and a 180-ft.-high "cloud" canopy, designed to provide daytime shade and a nighttime projection screen. The $1 billion project is sponsored by The Rouse Co. (Columbia, MD), with Altoon Porter Architects' (Los Angeles) and R/GA Media Group's (New York City) design and software expertise. Illustration courtesy of The Rouse Company.

To give you an idea of Rouse's scope, in May 2002, it paid $5.3 billion to acquire interests in eight premium retail centers: Detroit's Lakeside Mall; San Antonio's North Star Mall; Atlanta's Perimeter Mall; Chicago's Water Tower Place and Oakbrook Center; plus The Streets of Southpoint in Durham, NC; Collin Creek in Plano, TX; and Willowbrook in northern New Jersey. The Rouse Co. has an interest in more than 200 properties, including such malls as Cleveland's Beachwood Place, Salt Lake City's Fashion Place, Baltimore's White Marsh and Fort Worth's Hulen Mall.

Regarding Fashion Show, the Las Vegas Sun (August 2000) reported the 1-million-sq.-ft. expansion and improvements would cost Rouse $1 billion. Upon completion (October 2003), Fashion Show, enveloping 1,768,150 sq. ft. of commercial space, featuring more than 300 shops and employing 6,000 people, will contain eight major retailers: Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy's, Dillard's, Robinsons-May, Nordstrom and Bloomingdales.

Rouse hired Altoon + Porter Architects to transform the existing mall and its 1,000-ft. frontage. Rouse and Altoon + Porter worked with Henry Beer, co-founder of Communication Arts Inc. (Boulder, CO), a 75-person company specializing in resort, retail, entertainment, media and branding environments. Communication Art's portfolio holds credits from Denver's Park Meadows, Barcelona's Diagonal Mar, The Block at Orange and Disney's Grand Californian Hotel. Beer's award-winning work is nationally recognized.

The concept: IMAX-sized, moveable LED screens coupled with 60-in. (diagonal) plasma screens. The first set of LEDs is positioned in a "Great Hall" fashion-show arena; the second set is planned for the mall's entryway area. According to the concept plan, the sets will be arranged in a series of four, huge moveable LED screens (1,786 sq. ft. overall) on tracks. The entryway also awaits the signature architectural element: a canopy "cloud" structure that "floats" 180 ft. above the plaza. It provides shade during the day but becomes a giant screen for projected images at night.

The project includes studio-quality video, sound and editing equipment for real-time projection of fashion shows, product introductions, special events and entertainment. A glass-encased, show-control room that stands above the hall allows visitors to see the production work in action. Remote and handheld video cameras, directed from this control room, disperse live-action footage to the LED and plasma screens located in the mall.

Daily fashion shows at the oval-shaped "Great Room" are real-time broadcast to plasma screens throughout the mall. Note moveable LED screens behind the models.

For the LED displays, Rouse awarded a $8.2-million contract to Barco Media (Kennesaw, GA), a part of Barco Projection (Noordlaan, Belgium), a firm that specializes in developing "customized visual communication solutions for the media and sports markets." Barco will provide 4,300 sq. ft. of its Ilite and Dlite indoor and outdoor display LEDs. Barco says, and its concept illustrations confirm, the outdoor displays will become one of the most recognized sites in Las Vegas.

Inside, Fashion Show features an oval Great Hall where runway-type, live-model, fashion shows occur daily. These shows are filmed (using digital video) and real-time broadcast to the indoor set of plasma and moveable LED displays.

Barco's PR people describe phase one (the indoor LED fabrication and installation), thusly: "Three indoor ILite 8-based [8mm-resolution LEDs] displays will be suspended from motorized hoists in the ceiling to create a backdrop for a never-ending barrage of fashion shows and other special events, such as product introductions, to be presented in the large, open-air atrium known as The Great Hall."

Barco's contract award specified a two-phase project -- indoor (now operational) and outdoor (pending). Barco Media's Belgium-based Marcom manager, Sabine Cappaert, says the yet-to-be constructed outdoor project will use Barco's Dlite outdoor LEDs with 14mm resolution. The concept designers also included multi-use, flat, 61-in. plasma screens (NEC 61MP1) that will serve as directories, as well as advertising, interactive and live simulcast (fashion show) displays. Randy Byrd, Rouse's senior project manager, says "The [plasma] screens serve as high-tech bread crumbs, leading shoppers to the center of the live action."

Live action, surely, means cash registers.

The show director's control-room console.

The LED installation on test day.

At Fashion Show, the software mastermind is New York City-based R/GA Media Group, which also designed the software package for the 5.6-million-LED Reuters Times Square display. When first built, the 23-story-high Reuters spectacular was lauded as the world's largest, electronic-digital sign. True or false, its software processes information from 20 global news feeds through a series of R/GA-created software templates that seamlessly publish news content and images in real time, with scarce human interaction.

Founded in 1977, R/GA, has won more than 1,500 awards, including the Academy Award and the Cannes Gold Lions. R/GA began integrating digital into its production processes in 1986 and, in 1992, was recognized by Fuji for its work in converging film, video and computers.

John Mayo-Smith, R/GA's VP of technology, who describes his company as "an interactive agency that works creatively on technology- driven projects," says the Fashion Show's challenge was programming for kinetic -- moving -- signage.

He says the entire LED operation -- meaning the content, programming, scheduling and sign movement -- required uncommon programming, because the LED displays break into segments. Depending upon the video/image plan, the multiple LEDs display one, two and three images, or one image may occupy all three.

To do this, R/GA created software "episodes," that is, ready-to-use software capsules embedded with codes that describe a viewing segment's scheduled appearance date, time and, because of the moveable LEDs, motion programming. See this like a labeled shipping box with nothing in it. As the segment is built, the program images (film, text, graphics, etc.) are added and, in essence, the shipping box is filled.

The Las Vegas Sun reported that the 1-million-sq.-ft. expansion would include 1,768,150 sq. ft. of commercial space and feature more than 300 shops, among them eight major retailers. Photo courtesy of Altoon Porter Architects.

When complete, episodes become "kinetic episode elements," which are stacked (queued) into a media server for distribution and continuous or interval showing. See this as the completed shipping box traveling on a programmed conveyor. Whereas the shipping box is destined for a loading dock and truck, the episode moves into an electronic conveyor, where it's directed into a video router that sends it to the appropriate LED or plasma panel.

Interestingly, the LED panel's motion, for safety reasons, isn't automated. The software cues the motion systems, but they activate only after the manual overrides are activated. Also, the LED and plasma software-drive systems don't include RIPs, because the images are bitmapped, rather than rasterized with addressable dot locations for printing.

John says the biggest challenge was balancing the capabilities of existing technology to the perceived requirements of the advertiser (buyer). Apparently, and conceding this is a spectacular project, the available technology far surpasses what we see at Fashion Show. But Rita Brandin, Rouse Co.'s VP and development director, offers what may be the project's greatest understatement. She says, "[It's] important to have your brand stand out from the pack."