Scalable Display Technologies Drives Multi-Story Projection Experience at the Obama Presidential Center

Located on Chicago’s South Side, the Obama Presidential Center is a 19.3-acre campus that serves as a civic and cultural space, including a four-floor museum, program rooms, a public library branch, an athletic center, an auditorium, and community gathering spaces. At the center of the museum experience are large-scale immersive media installations designed to support storytelling throughout the facility.

The museum explores themes of democracy, civic engagement and social change through interactive exhibits, archival materials and multimedia environments throughout the building. Among the museum’s most technically demanding installations are “Power of Words,” a four-story projection experience extending through the museum atrium, and a 360-degree circular projection environment featuring custom digital artwork developed in collaboration with a French artist.

“Power of Words” spans approximately 85 feet vertically across four museum floors, allowing visitors to view the installation from multiple balcony levels throughout the atrium. The projection system consists of seven projectors positioned across multiple floors, including four landscape-oriented projectors covering the primary wall surface and three portrait-oriented projectors covering an adjacent wall. The second installation uses eight projectors arranged around a circular projection ring to create a continuous immersive display.

The scale and complexity of the installations created significant operational challenges for the museum team. The large-format multi-projector systems require consistent alignment and calibration to maintain a seamless image, particularly in public environments like the Obama Presidential Center, which are subject to vibration, HVAC activity, temperature fluctuations and ongoing visitor traffic. In the case of “Power of Words,” the projection surface itself spans four stories and is integrated directly into the building structure, introducing subtle shifts in geometry and screen tension over time.

“We needed a system that would allow us to automate alignment and maintain image quality without requiring constant manual intervention,” said Paul Horst, senior manager of exhibition AV systems for the Obama Presidential Center.

Without automated calibration, maintaining systems of this scale often requires ongoing involvement from highly specialized projection technicians who can manually adjust geometry, warping and edge blending. In museum environments that operate daily with limited onsite technical staffing, those workflows can become difficult to sustain long-term.

To address those challenges, The Obama Foundation selected Scalable Display Technologies, whose software enables multiple projectors to operate as a single seamless display. Using camera-based calibration, the software automatically aligns geometry, and blends edges across projection surfaces of varying shapes and scales. What traditionally required days of manual alignment by specialized technicians can instead be completed through automated recalibration workflows.

The ability to rapidly recalibrate large projection environments was particularly important for a museum installation that operated continuously without dedicated projection specialists onsite. Projection systems naturally drift over time due to environmental conditions, vibration, projector maintenance and changes in screen geometry. Scalable’s software allows operators to restore alignment through automated recalibration rather than relying on time-intensive manual adjustments or external service calls.

“We’ve been working with Scalable on batch files to run calibration from the command line, automatically generate MPCDI files, copy those files into the media server and trigger the media server to load updated calibration data,” explained Horst.

The automated workflow also coordinates environmental controls during recalibration, including projector warm-up periods and temporary lighting adjustments. Once recalibration is initiated, the system generates updated alignment datasets that can be deployed without extensive manual correction. “The recalibration process inside Scalable’s software has worked extremely well,” said Horst. “It’s very helpful to warm up the projectors, run recalibration and achieve a clean updated alignment without extensive manual work.”

Scalable’s projection technology is widely used in simulation, museum and immersive entertainment environments where image consistency and reliability are critical. The same automated calibration workflows used in defense and aerospace simulation systems are also deployed in projection mapping installations, themed entertainment environments and large-scale immersive exhibits where multiple projectors must behave as a single unified image.

The architectural design of the atrium installation also introduced unique geometric challenges. Because of balcony placement and limited projector mounting positions, the system required projection across two intersecting wall planes positioned at nearly 90-degree angles. Several projectors were forced to operate at extreme projection angles where image spillover between adjacent surfaces became difficult to manage.

To accommodate these conditions, Scalable collaborated with The Obama Foundation to develop a software feature called Projector Groups. The feature allows separate warp-and-blend operations across independent projection surfaces while maintaining controlled edge transitions between content regions. Horst explained, “That allowed independent warp and blend operations on each wall with a defined hard-edge seam between content regions.”

Prior to full deployment, The Obama Foundation developed both a full-scale projection mock-up and a miniature physical model replicating the final projector configuration. The process allowed the project team and Scalable engineers to test geometry, camera placement, media playback and calibration behavior before installation inside the museum.

“By the time we entered the building installation phase, we already felt confident the system would work,” said Horst.

In addition to the technical capabilities of the software, Horst cited Scalable’s engineering support and responsiveness as a major factor throughout the project. “One of the biggest factors, honestly, wasn’t technical — it was customer service,” he said. “They’ve been very active throughout the process, added entirely new software features to solve challenges unique to our project and responded quickly whenever issues came up.”

According to Horst, the system’s stability allowed exhibit designers and media producers to focus on refining content presentation rather than resolving projection issues during deployment.

“The installation looks extremely clean,” Horst said. “Honestly, one of the best outcomes is that nobody comments on the projection itself, which is exactly what you want. It simply looks the way it’s supposed to look.”