New technologies are like K-pop acts: They burst onto the public stage, seemingly fully formed. Maybe not perfect, but certainly polished and in tune. Nobody sees the long, lonely hours of pain and practice that got them there.

Now, it may be a stretch to see the Christie LED team as K-pop impresarios, but as far as ProAV LED goes, they’ve been an integral part of a worldwide effort to get this tech stage ready and media-friendly. And they’re as enthusiastic about their “protégé’s” potential as any music biz maestro — they say the things they’ve seen in rehearsal mean the big time beckons.

All singing. All dancing.

To discover why they think LED’s best work still lies ahead, AVenue caught up with four members of the LED team at Christie: Marc Lemieux, principal architect, display technology; Harminder Banwait, director of program management LED and LCD displays; Mike Bernhardt, director of product management, enterprise engineering; and James Robinson, executive director, display engineering.

The first thing they spoke about was the inherent advantages of direct-view LED as a technology: The way the blacks are truly black, the whites genuinely white, and the punch that comes from massively saturated colors in an image made up of individually illuminated RGB dots. They explained how the potential was evident the moment the first commercially available blue LED joined red and green in 1989 and how that makes LED a young technology with plenty of maturing still to do.

But LED can dance as well as sing. Its inherent physical flexibility has the potential to finally deliver the idea of pixels everywhere, as Marc Lemieux explained. “There’s no reason for LED to be constrained by these rectilinear boxes we call screens, which betray the fact that there is a display,” Marc says. “It’s already begun with MicroTiles LED, but once you have the ability to put pixels on every surface — and we will have — then we can use that to enhance our environment at will. We could drop ourselves into somewhere entirely new and change the mood of a room in an instant.”

This is already happening in controlled environments, like rental staging and media production, and it’s starting to happen in museums and galleries where LED allows for an almost infinite repurposing and reconfiguration of displays. It shows what can happen when an infinitely flexible physical format combines with benchmark-quality images.

Within our grasp

The potential of what can happen is the exciting part for the team. James Robinson says content creators are realizing they’re at the dawn of a new age. “We find ourselves sitting with some of the top creative storytellers at the world’s top creative companies, listening to them dream in technicolor about the next bold new experiences they want to create,” he says. “And what we consistently find is that the ‘impossibilities’ that they describe to us are within our grasp, given the appropriate focused development time. We can actually enable them to create these bold new experiences because of our technology.”

Mike Bernhardt takes up the story. “A while back, we were with one of James’ technicolor dreamers and he was skeptical about LED. But as we were talking to him and showing him the capabilities we were introducing, he suddenly stopped and said, ‘Good grief! That thing I’ve dreamt about. It is possible!’ And that’s been the story of LED for me — everyone’s expectations get overturned.”

“When you can make any shape or size, with an optically perfect experience using what’s become a reliable and rugged product, why shouldn’t you dream big?” asks Harminder Banwait.