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The Z by HP launch floor from above: three curved LED walls, the blue BAC car, workstation carts, and guests moving between the worlds under the pier's truss
Deep Dives

Z8 Fury Launch · New York, NY

Z by HP: Inside the Z8 Fury Launch

HP wanted guests standing inside the work its new workstation does, not reading about it. That meant four rendered worlds on three curved LED walls, staged on a working Hudson River pier that had nowhere near the power to run them.

By the numbers

3
Curved LED walls
216
LED tiles
8M
LED pixels
46 ft
SEG graphics wall

Four worlds, one floor

The Z8 Fury is a machine for people who render things, so the launch skipped the spec sheet and put guests inside the output.

Three curved LED walls wrapped the floor at Classic Car Club Manhattan, each one running a world the workstation could produce. A Hendrick Motorsports race shop. The BAC track car under studio light. An off-road desert. A deep-water dive. In front of every wall sat a Z8 Fury and a monitor, so a guest could step from the picture straight to the machine that made it, and the floor graphics carried each theme all the way to the ground.

The complication was the address. Classic Car Club sits on Pier 76, a working Hudson River pier, and a working pier cannot hand you the power an eight-million-pixel room needs. We brought it in and built the distribution the whole environment ran on.

The launch floor at Classic Car Club: guests, the blue BAC car, and curved LED walls under the pier's truss Two curved LED walls meeting at the Z with Intel corner, an off-road world on one and a racetrack on the other The blue BAC car under blue light in front of the racing world wall, BAC lettered on the floor The BAC car beside the curved wall running track-cockpit content Hendrick Motorsports race-shop content on a curved wall, a Z8 Fury on a workstation cart, the team's floor decal A presenter demoing at the curved wall for a small group of guests The blue BAC car up close on the launch floor The matte-black Z with Intel graphics wall and a Z8 Fury demo desk under the gold drape Race-shop content on the curved wall behind a workstation cart and stacked purple tires Guests watching the race-shop world on a curved LED wall, a Z8 Fury on the cart in front Guests on the desert sand floor in front of the off-road world, gold drape overhead

The curve is the hard part

Curved LED frames going up on the empty pier floor, tile backs exposed, crew at work
Tile by tile, trued to the curve.

Flat walls are forgiving. A curve is seventy-two tiles stacked on ground support and trued into an arc before a single pixel lights, and a frame that sits a few millimeters proud will show as a seam from across the room. We built three of them, 216 tiles in all.

Then it has to look like one room. We framed the walls and the 46-foot graphics wall in beMatrix, ran processing and cable, and color-matched every panel so four separate worlds read as though they came off the same machine.

Load-in was the day before doors, five of our technicians on it. By the time the first guest walked in, an empty pier floor read as a finished set.

A curved wall frame and the graphics wall skeleton mid-build, ladder against the truss The back of the LED tile wall during the build, ladder and road cases alongside

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G2E 2022