Barco’s new Experience Center in its Belgian HQ is a fascinating snapshot of where we are in terms of the moving image. I take a look around.
Which tech company has won two Emmy awards, four AIS Lumiere awards, an Academy Award, a Red Dot Product award, was recognized in 2024 and 2025 as one of the World’s 500 Most Sustainable Companies by TIME Magazine, and also holds the Guinness World Record for the brightest projector? If you answered Barco , then color me impressed – and I want you on my team at the next pub quiz.
As one of its representatives said at a media day at the opening of a new experience center at its headquarters, “Barco is a company the world should know, but doesn’t.” As someone who writes about cinema technology, Barco is familiar to me for its cinema projectors. — powering some 60 per cent of the world’s cinemas. It's no surprise then that the cinema division is its largest business unit within its largest division: entertainment, which in 2024, accounted for 44% of its revenue. But, as I found out after a visit to its new media center at its headquarters in the relatively obscure Belgian town of Kortrijk, Barco’s expertise extends beyond this, with significant offerings in the healthcare and enterprise sectors. Barco’s headquarters impressed as soon as I arrived: its curved structure put me in mind of Apple’s famous new Steve Jobs-inspired circular building, albeit at a smaller scale; at its center is “The Circle”, a striking all-glass structure with a 75-meter diameter and 25-meter height.The tour started with an impressive experience wall display that opened up to reveal an array of display panels of various shapes and sizes. The imagery and voiceover showcased how, despite being well-known for its hardware solutions, Barco is heavily involved in improving image quality @behind the scenes” through its image processing technology, which it said was designed to intensify colors, optimize motion, remove noise, and expand dynamic range. We then got to see samples of it offered for the healthcare market. This involved a room with will that moved and opened up to reveal secrets like a James Bond baddie. Rather than a plan to knock out Fort Knox though, we were shown a mockup surgical room, with two cable-free displays. Taking into account that surgeons will quite literally have their hands full, these have been designed to respond to voice commands to bring up high-resolution images of a patient’s insides and to allow another remote Doctor to see these images for a second opinion.There were two party tricks, however. The first was the use of AI segmentation to automatically highlight the key areas that needed to be targeted, allowing for a “no-go” zone so the surgeon cannot accidentally make incisions where there should be none. The second was a display that offered true, glasses-free 3D imaging. This enables up to two people to sit in front of the screen and see a high-resolution, detailed, fully 3D image floating in space in front of the screen. The demo was of a transparent heart, which could be manipulated with a mouse to rotate it around, thus enabling doctors to make better pre-operation decisions for better surgical outcomes. While I only got to try this for a few seconds, it was remarkably effective, and a lot more impressive than a prototype glasses-free TV that I saw about a decade ago. While you can't tell from a simple snapshot, Barco seems to have cracked the glasses-free 3D nut, but only for small-scale displays, not for cinema.It was the arrival of digital cinema projection by Barco that enabled the reintroduction of 3D to cinema , and despite naysayers, 3D is effective for certain films and still popular. That said, having to wear glasses is still a bugbear, so I was curious to know if this glasses-free technique could have an application in cinema? The glasses-free medical display uses eye-tracking technology to project an image divided into two from a lenticular lens laminated onto the screen. While this is effective for two people, according to Stijn Crul, a product manager at Barco, this technique sadly does not lend itself to a room with potentially hundreds of people. It seems then, that for cinema 3D, the glasses will need to stay on for the foreseeable future.and theme parks. The next room showcased this, with several ceiling-mounted projectors transforming the room we were in into different environments, with an impressive amount of detail.After this, the next highlight was a visit to a demo home cinema featuring Barco Residential technology. Specifically, it’s Heimdal+, which takes its three-chip technology used in its cinema projectors and, for the first time, moves it into a single-chip native 4K design. While quite a beast compared to your average home cinema projector, it was quiet enough to run open in the room rather than in an enclosure, impressive for a device of this size. And as for the output, the image, as demonstrated using a scene from, bringing fully-fledged HDR to cinema-sized projection for the first time, and this is currently being rolled out across Europe by Vue in itsThe final part of the visit was a look around the on-site testing facilities. Part of the Product Validation Group, we were shown an array of frankly scary-looking machines designed to drop, shake, heat up and condensate Barco’s equipment in seemingly medieval ways. It’s all done for a good reason, however, which is to ensure that all its products operate reliably, whatever the environment, whether the cinema is located in the low temperatures of Norway or a boiling hot day in Morocco.As part of the day, we were also treated to a fascinating talk by its head of innovation, Peru Dharani, who took us on a journey from the earliest shamanic cave paintings, discovered in Lascaux, France in the 1940s and estimated to be up to 20,000 years old, to the latest in AI-generated art. He observed that in terms of human storytelling, cinema is just 130 years old, only a few frames into the story of humanity, which means there’s much more to come, and that’s something to get excited about.‘Tron: Ares’ Is Showing In Five Different 3D Formats — But Which Is Best?
Immersive Projection HDR Heimdal+ Testing
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