About Media Facade, Something you should know!

What’s the media facade?

The media facade can turn any building facade or a whole structure into a remarkable dynamic world.

It was made by seamlessly integrating LED video lights or mesh screens into the structure facades.

Specifically, an amount of individually controllable lights or LED mesh screen units are attached to the facades or even woven into the surfaces of the building as part of structure materials.

As a result, the bespoke media facades are able to display text, pictures, animations, and videos.

In fact, the successful media facade not only communicates the information, but also interacts with the audience. What’s more, it makes the characteristics of architecture stand out.

Why building a good media facade is so important?

1, Creating urban landscapes

In the past, the buildings are not obvious when night falls.

By the development of LED video lighting and screen technology, architects and designers are capable to express more dynamic concepts on architecture.

The media facades are required to enhance the identity of the building, furthermore, to present the brand and reflect the culture of the surrounding space.

It gets the audience to talk about it and remember it in a long time.

Finally, the decorated architecture become the landmark in its location.

More and more landmark buildings together light up the skylines of the city.

They can work synchronously, and eventually, they will become the urban landscape that delivers remarkable impressions like the Shenzhen Light show.

2, Branding your architecture and your business

Global companies want to create architectural icons and build their brand reputations at their retail outlets or headquarters.

But in a modern city, you can find tons of similar things like signs, or traditional led advertising displays on the buildings. You’ll forget them just after a while.

How to make your building stand out among the digital world?

The media facade is the answer!

By deploying the led video lights or slim led mesh wrapping up the whole building, we can create a unique dynamic facade.

When night comes, the large scale media facade transforms your architecture into the spectacular brand identity

For example, the Dubai Town (Burj Khalifa) is well-known for its wonderful led light show made by media facade, not only as the tallest building in the world.

It has become a must-see attraction when visiting Dubai. Obviously, the LED media facade help to build the brand of the building, even the city.

3, Getting huge advertising income after investing in led media facade

Everybody knows that a traditional led display can do advertising.

LED media facade can also do advertising.

Is there something new to do advertising with the media facade? 

Here I just want to emphasize how much the advertising income will be if the city’s iconic building plays the advertising?  

The Dubai Tower advertising fee is about 2 million US dollars for just one minute. But the advertising cost on a traditional led billboard in Los Angeles is about $1000 to $10,000 per month and it is actually higher than in many other cities.

Dubai and Los Angeles are both big cities. But what a big difference is between the led media facade and the traditional led wall!

You may say Dubai Town is the tallest building in the world.

However, in most situations, the advertising revenue on the building facade is much higher than on a traditional led screen. Because a media facade is much bigger than a traditional led screen.

What’s more, the investment to install a led media facade is less than to build a smaller size traditional led display.

What are the main types of LED media facade？

Since installing a media façade is so important for the modern architectural design, we’d better know a little more about the LED media façade, whether you are a landscape designer or an advertising company.

What kinds of products are suitable to make the media façade on big buildings?

There are two categories, which are media mesh facade and media facade elements.

Media mesh facade is close in the form of led screen. A big facade is made up of the same size panels.

The media facade elements mainly include the LED pixel dots and LED media strips. They are more flexible to place on everywhere on your building like architecture lighting but used to play videos.

Media Mesh Facade

Flexible LED Media Mesh

The LED media mesh series is highly transparent and extremely lightweight. The flexible dot led mesh is the most popular one, when making a large scale media facade especially more than 500 square meters.

Its pixel pitch is often more than 50mm for a large area.

A big led façade is assembled by hundreds of LED mesh modules. One module can be 4mtrs~20mtrs length, depending on the pixel pitch.

Every module is made up of LED pixel strings and lightweight plastic or aluminum frame.

The flexible led mesh is a very smart product, which can be used not only on a rectangular surface wall but also available to form irregular shapes like triangle, rhombus, circle on the building facades.

Rigid LED Curtain Mesh

The Rigid LED Mesh Curtain has a smaller pixel pitch compared to the flexible dot mesh.

Due to its high resolution, it is best for small size led facade around 30~50square meters.

But it is also good choice for outdoor large scale media facade as long as within your budget.

Meantime, it keeps the features of transparency, lightweight and slim design. What’s more, it is IP67 and all-weather bearable, working well under harsh environment.

LED Glass Mesh (Transparent LED display)

The LED glass mesh(Transparent LED display) is an indoor and higher resolution led facade screen. It can play high-definition images and videos.

It has a low brightness model only for nighttime, and a high brightness model that is viewable for daytime too.

To choose which type of media mesh for your building facade, you can get more details by checking the below blog.

Media Facade Elements

LED Media Tube

The LED Media Tube is a high resolution led video lighting.

The popular Lega7.8 has 4*128pixels. And it has multiple installation way.

With thousands of LED video tubes together, you can create a stunning led mesh facade on the indoor or outdoor structure surface.

By deploying the video tubes with different distances, you can easily adjust the resolution and transparency of the media facade.

It also has a wide range pixel pitch options like P6.5, P10, P25 and P50.

In general, this is a smart product that combined the advantage of lighting and screen. The designers like to use it to make a creative led facade wall .

LED Video Strip

The LED video strip is another type of video lighting fixture that is ultra-slim. It is IP67 and has high brightness.

With them, you can build a creative media facade, for example, to fill in the narrow space between windows, or to wrap up some special structure like a pillar.

When an array of led pixel strips together on a big area of the building facade, they are able to play animations and videos as well.

The standard led strip length is one meter, but it can be also customized to be different lengths.

LED Pixel Dot

The LED Pixel Dot is the most creative LED element. It is not only the component of the flexible LED mesh, but it can be also used separately in the form of soft led strings to mount on uneven surface of the building.

With its customizable pixel space, soft cable and flexible installation way, you could easily attach them to the rugged surface.

It actually can make a media facade in all kinds of shapes. For example, with many led strings, you could make a 3D media façade.

Common features of media facade

There are many LED products in the market claimed they are good at building a media façade. But some may not meet the quality standard or design idea. Before you design or choose the product for your facade, you can learn some features of led media façade in advance.

Here are some basic features of the media facade which differentiate them from the traditional led screen. Besides, there are also other characters for led media façade like flexible, beautiful appearance, etc.

Individually programmable pixels

People were familiar with LED lighting elements for decorative illumination. For example, in some important areas of buildings such as the roof, edge, corner, pillar, they could be illuminated by kinds of lighting fixtures like led wall washer or led flood lights.

But when you want to play videos on a big wall, the lights like the LED wall washer couldn’t do the job. It could only play the color changing for the entire wall or a big area.

Whereas, the LED media façade gives the designers infinite possibilities as every position of the wall could be appointed a color by placing programmable pixels.

No limitness for the media facade area

To play a video on facades and highlight the building, a media facade is always at least hundreds of square meters, sometimes thousand square meters to wrap the whole surfaces.

The chosen media facade product must have no limitness for the area.

The building itself decides the type of the media facade. But the media facade can be any size no matter on the glass wall or brick wall or irregular shape surface.

Both big and small pixel pitch available

When covering thousands of square meters with a small pixel pitch, it’ll take big cost, and bring much power consumption.

Since people often watch the entire building wall at a long distance, a big pixel pitch LED façade like P50~100mm would be enough to display recognizable images.

Of course, if you only light up the small central area, it is also applicable with a smaller pitch media mesh wall like P7.8~P25mm.

The power consumption and load weight need to be considered. Whereas, the budget cost is the main factor to choose which pixel pitch.

For some project, the property owner like to mix use different pitch led mesh screens on the same building.

In this situation, different pixel pitch media mesh screens work together under the same system. The different pitch and transparent meshes play complete and continuous videos on all the building facades.

High transparency

Since at present most of the modern building facades are glass walls, it is important not to block the natural light when installing a large LED media facade over the glass.

In addition, designers do not want the media facade to interfere with the original landscape design.

The ideal situation is that the LED media facade is invisible when the light does not turn on.

Therefore, it is very important to make an LED facade with the highest possible transparency; in some cases, transparency of 90% or higher is required.

Ultra-Lightweight

An ultra-lightweight led media wall on the façade brings many advantages such as avoiding the big and heavy support structure, reducing the screen dropping risky, as well as saving the installation & shipping cost.

Ultra-Slim

An ultra-slim led media facade saves space for installation and provides the possibility to integrates the led wall with the building surface seamlessly.

It lets the media façade able to be creative shapes like curve, circle, triangle or 3D shape.

Easy Installation & Maintenance structure

When hang or fix the led media façade on hundred meters high from the ground, it must use a very stable product. And meantime, it should be very easy to install and maintain.

Centralized controlling

When you install multiple led facades on several surfaces, a centralized controlling system is essential! You don’t need to build several control centers.

The professional LED system can connect to PC/Laptop, and also support remote controlling like WiFi, and the cloud-based content managing system.

Special specifications you need to pay attention to when choosing a media facade product

For media mesh or media facade elements, there are too many names in the market.

Firstly there aren’t uniform regulations to name the led facade products and unify the specifications. Furthermore, some media facade products can be customized and then get more and more variants.

It often makes the buyer or the designer confused to choose which LED media façade would be best for their project.

To help you get the right media façade product, I just want to tell you some important specifications you need to pay attention to.

Viewing Distance

Each display will have a recommended minimum viewing distance and the optimal viewing distance.

Though the viewing distance can roughly be calculated, it is somewhat subjective.

For a direct view LED screen, we often say the minimum viewing distance is about 1meter (3.28feet) per pitch 1mm, for example, P30mm is 30 meters. And the optimal viewing distance is 3X the distance.

When less than the minimum viewing distance, you can still watch the screen, but will see the individual LEDs.

LED media façade is usually covering a big area and is often viewed from a very long distance.

So there is a bigger range for the minimum viewing distance of media facade screen, for example,  30~50m for P50mm mesh, 70~100m for P100mm mesh, etc.

Resolution

Higher resolution means shorter viewing distance but higher cost and less transparency.

We better look at all the factors based on the application and the intended use

Different design will bring different visual experience.

Finding the right product that balances the viewing distance and resolution can save you a lot of money.

Sometimes, taking samples of the LED media facade for on-site testing, this may be a good suggestion before placing a large quantity order.

Brightness, Viewability

In the past, LED media façade was only watched at night.

Now, for some iconic buildings, people want to have the media wall work during the day-time too.

Making a media façade that is not bright enough or too bright, will both waste your money.

Therefore, determining the right brightness for your application is extremely important.

Here are some guidelines to help you choose the brightness for your LED media facade:

Indoor Brightness:

500-800 nits is enough for indoor night-time use;

1000-1500 nits is enough for all indoor situations, daytime and nighttime;

Outdoor Brightness:

800-1000 nits is enough for outdoor night-time use;

1000-1500 nits is enough for outdoor use at dusk;

2000-3000 nits is enough for some outdoor situations; 

5,000 + nits should be enough for most outdoor situations;

7,000 + nits should be enough for all outdoor applications, including direct-sun situations;

Weight Limit

When building a hug media façade, the weight limit for the facade is one of the critical factors to decide if the chosen led façade type is safe.

Not only the led facade’s own weight, but also should the support frame weight be considered.

Taking P100mm led media mesh for example, its screen bodyweight is 2KG per square meter. The support frame mounted on the wall is about 8KG per square meter.

Weather resistance

LED media façade is often asked to installing outside, where it’s exposed to rain, UV, sometimes harsh environments like salt spray area close to the sea, and very high environment temperature in desert cities, etc. 

To confirm your selected led façade product is really weatherproof for your project environment is very important to guarantee your investment.

Firstly, you must know some details about the product materials used in the media façade, what’s the brand of LED, IC, and cable material, etc.

Secondly, you need to know if they have strict tests about the weather resistance, the IP grade test, the vibration test, the cyclic temperature test, the surge/transient test, the test against wind speed, gust and rain, the tension test, the fire resistance test and salt fog test, etc.

Maintenance

When it comes to maintenance, at first we need to know how to repair or change the broken part in the high building facade.

Good media façade design should always pay attention to how to simplify product maintenance.

Powerful control system

sACN / Artnet support controller

sACN, the streaming media architecture that controls the network, is a standard network protocol. It is widely used in the entertainment and architectural lighting technology industries because it enables many DMX signals to run on the network. sACN is ideal for creating large-scale light shows.

We have controllers that supports sACN or Artnet. It will be useful for the light designers to create scenes by using their familiar software.

Novastar controller

Our media facade products can use Novastar system. It is a powerful and widely used system in LED screen industry.

For media facade, it is also a giant led screen though its pixel pitch is much bigger. Novastar is a good choice due to its stable performance, powerful video processing, and cloud support.

Related case

During the day, the building is eye-catching by its unique architectural style. In the evening, through the LED Media Facade covering the entire building, playing kinds of attractive animations and videos, makes the building a landmark of the city in the full day.

*We’ll keep the content updated and write more blogs to share more technology about LED media facade. Please stay tuned!

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