Players at The Gardens Casino in Hawaiian Gardens, California take their poker seriously. In fact, the casino often hosts major tournaments in addition to round-the-clock play in their famed poker room. A recent $90 million renovation added a 200,000-square-foot building featuring over 300 playing tables, a restaurant and bar, a VIP lounge, two multi-use halls—and a stunning, Nixel Series™ Truly Curved LED display from NanoLumens®, award-winning creators of uniquely compelling interactive LED visualization solutions. “We needed a display that would allow players to see various sporting events while they played and enable us to market the casino with some eye-catching graphics and content,” explained Ron Sarabi, general manager at The Gardens Casino. “The best spot to put this display was in our poker room to maximize viewership.”
NanoLumens designed a 178-by-4.43-foot curved display with a 2.5mm pixel pitch that stretches across the top of the poker room’s VIP entrance and is viewable from every table in the room.
The secret to NanoLumens’ truly curved display technology is the patented Nixel™, the flexible building block that comprises all NanoLumens Nixel Series displays. This technology is flexible for both convex and concave curves and bends to conform to the display’s mounting surface or required curvature, creating a truly curved display with no gaps or seams. The end result is a better horizon view with no black lines or loss of visibility up to 160 degrees.
However, there were a few challenges that both NanoLumens and the integrator, Jojo Deseo of AVI-SPL, were dealt before all the cards to this install were laid on the table.
“The space this display was being placed in wasn’t built for the display size the casino wanted,” said Deseo, design engineer at AVI-SPL. “So NanoLumens had to produce a custom, very long and narrow display with a difficult curve radius to make it work in this space.”
NanoLumens designed a custom wall bracket to house the display that was a critical component in helping the curved display fit a space, that as Deseo explained, “was not designed and built as a supporting surface for this installation.” The wall bracket became the supporting surface for the display.
Deseo added that while the need to design the wall bracket presented NanoLumens with a significant challenge they deftly handled, AVI-SPL tackled a few themselves as this install got underway.
“With a display this large we were also tasked with installing some 900 separate tablet-sized Nixel panels that the display would be comprised of,” he said. “Each of the panels had a Nixel count of 100 (w) by 9 (h) for a total of 900 Nixels, with each panel approximately 6-by-9 inches in size. This had to be done in a very precise manner.
“This install had to take place while customers were busy gambling. Working with these 900 Nixel panels, lifts and the mounting and drilling we were doing was tricky in a public space, while trying not to disrupt the patrons gambling in the casino.”
The Nixel Series Truly Curved LED display handles up to ten different content sources or content from one source across the entire display and seamlessly integrates with the additional equipment AVI-SPL installed that fed content to the display.
Jeff Wyatt, creative director at Dreamlab (a talent-driven digital asset company specializing in ultra high-definition video content creation for environmental spaces), has a successful history working with NanoLumens, having created content for their showrooms and handling all of the digital content creation for the Gardens Casino display.
“It was very interesting to work with this display as it was very narrow and very long—not exactly a standard size—and it was designed as one full-size display,” he said.
Wyatt created marketing content to be displayed over the full length of the display, including a 3D animated golden dragon that sprints across the full length of the screen.
“The content I create always looks great on NanoLumens screens. With some manufacturers I need to stay away from certain colors because they just don’t pop,” he Wyatt. “But NanoLumens displays are so flexible and viewable from all angles, I don’t have to worry about color as everything pops on their displays.”
Wyatt added that working with a curved display opened up some additional creative options as well. “I wasn’t sure initially if I’d be creating content at 30fps but with the curved display the movement looks so smooth and NanoLumens displays handle 60fps no problem,” he said. “The challenge to be creative with this size screen was also fun to tackle.”
Regarding the effectiveness of the curved display at The Gardens Casino, NanoLumens Regional Sales Manager Kara Green added, “What NanoLumens is able to do with the Nixel Series Truly Curved LED displays is magic. This really was a fantastic install and the curved display really livens up the space and calls a lot of attention to that area in the casino and that was the goal.”
For Sarabi, the fact this display is running 24/7-365 at The Gardens Casino means the reliability, ease-of-repair and six-year Nixel to Pixel warranty all provide some very necessary peace-of-mind.
“With a place that is in operation round-the-clock we can’t afford to deal with tech issues and with NanoLumens we don’t have to,” he concluded.
