Calit2 THEATER

The Calit2 Theater is a multipurpose room and ‘Black Box’ space available for research, exhibitions or events.

Theater at a glance

The Calit2 Theater is a multipurpose room and ‘Black Box’ space available for research, exhibitions or events. It is a 2-story, reconfigurable space with reconfigurable risers and movable seating for up to 90 people. Equipment includes a multi-channel Meyer Cinema Surround Sound system, a Sony SKRD-R110 4K projector and a fully digital controlled lighting with smart light fixtures. The Theater also features Vroom (short for “Virtual room”), a large-scale, tiled visualization display system covering one wall of the Black Box space. Vroom is a next-generation, reconfigurable tiled display environment that features four rows of eight displays for a total of 32 narrow-bezel NEC LCD displays, each with a 55" screen diagonal. The displays have full HD resolution (1920x1080 pixels), adding up to 66 million pixels on the entire wall (15,360 x 4,320 pixels). Vroom also supports multi-channel audio, and uses a multi-camera optical tracking system from Vicon. All displays have been attached in 2x2 patterns to mounting structures, which are either installed in movable containers (OptiPortables) or suspended from above. The displays are driven by 16 rendering PCs running Linux, each with dual Nvidia Geforce 580 graphics cards. Additionally, there are three separate control PCs (head nodes), each of them set up for one of the three supported software environments, Mediacommons, CalVR and SAGE.