Visual Merchandising and Technology: The Packable Led Cube Wall Of Experience

Visual merchandising and immersive media: the packable led cube, a digital installation which merges technological innovation, experience, and function

Porta di Roma is one of the largest shopping centers in Europe,the crown jewel of Klépierre, a French giant in the shopping sector center; with its 267 stores and over 92,000 sqm, Porta di Roma attracts more than 18 million people each year.

The project was born from the client’s need to renovate the shopping center, adding a visual merchandising system able to increase the center’s visibility and offer an innovative and engaging shopping experience for visitors.

Working in close contact with Klépierre, the 3P Technologies team was able to identify and evolve the client’s needs, introducing the Packable Led Cube, a focal point of attention to attract, inform, and entertain the shopping center customers.

The solution designed by 3P looks to the future of visual merchandising, integrating a high level of mechanical expertise, with automation and the distribution of images and sound, thanks also to the close collaboration with the Drawlight Creative Studio.

The packable led cube, from conception to production

 “An ambitious, innovative, and technologically advanced project,” says Massimo Celsa, Klépierre Project Manager: “Months of hard work, and at the end, an absolutely satisfactory result: a LED Display, of large dimensions for the Retail world, whose strong points are the silence and reliability of its mechanical movements, and the quality of its audio and visual displays. All concentrated in a solid structure that is perfectly integrated into the architectural structure of the shopping center, further enhancing it”.

The Packable Led Cube is a parallelepiped composed of 4 LED screens, for a total of almost 100 square meters, and divided into 12 rings of 50 cm each. Each ring is motorized and controlled by a processor able to synchronize the opening and closing of each ring, thus packing and unpacking the entire structure; a unique creation, the Packable Led Cube represented a great challenge from many standpoints.

Structural challenge: design and mechanical engineering

The concept required the Packable Led Cube to seem suspended in air, anchored in only a few points with the thinnest possible steel cables. Significant work was done on the design and mechanical engineering as concerns the hanging structure, and on the weight of the display to keep the whole structure as light as possible.

Technical challenge: hundreds of moving tiles

The technical challenge linked to movement was very delicate: installing hundreds of tiles, able to move constantly, required months of tests and micro-adjustments to ensure that at every closing movement, the surfaces of each ring were always perfectly flat and aligned.

The audio-video control of the system allows for multiwindow management of the viewing surface with the possibility to produce personalized layouts. The control system completely interfaces with the movement mechanics to properly synchronize the closing and opening of the Packable Led Cube with the video content.

A unique project in which technology is in dialogue with design

The Packable Led Cube was named one of the five international finalists for the Retail sector on the occasion of the “InAVation Awards 2020”, an event held every year on the occasion of the ISE, the largest fair in the world dedicated to professional audio video and systems integration.

In this project, technology enters into dialogue with design, to give life to a digital installation that represents a functional and innovative instrument for visual merchandising. In the retail sector, which requires constant evolution and renewal, the Packable Led Cube aims to satisfy the requests of increasingly demanding customers, focused on making the shopping experience more intense and unforgettable.