Building an Unforgettable Experience with Dimensional Innovations

When you walk into a hospital, the technology on the walls might be the last thing on your mind. But when it brightens your day, even just a little bit, it can serve as a positive distraction that you might never forget.

Earlier this year, John Coovert, Solutions Engineer at Dimensional Innovations (DI), joined the Daktronics Experience Podcast to talk about a project that includes an LED video wall in a hospital setting and many other audiovisual projects his team works on. The results are these positive distractions and other immersive environments that leave you thinking, “Wow! That was really cool!”

John talks about what it’s like working at Dimensional Innovations:

It’s fun to work at Dimensional Innovations because I have the very unique proposition of getting to work across the many disciplines in the audiovisual industry. Some people refer to the common nomenclature of “Design-Build” which is a quick and somewhat inaccurate assessment of what we do because it really only scratches the surface.

We have a lot going on under one roof. We have the design team, the creative studio that includes experience, design, content creation – which, in our world, covers everything from artifact curation to animation to video production to 3D video game development. So, the whole technology complement is inclusive of actually going in and building out an entire space. Experience design is what it’s all about.

And for me, I’m lucky enough to get to work across all of those departments. I work with our team to walk them down the path to make sure that the identified solution in properly serving the overall story, the overall experience and creating something that’s going to be truly remarkable and truly special from a design and creativity standpoint.

John on the first project he worked on with Daktronics:

Our first project with Daktronics was the University of Connecticut Hall of Champions in 2019. It wasn’t terribly common to see direct-view LED on a wall-facing type of space. So, I reached out to Daktronics and our design team to see if this was something we could work together on. And this project just seemed like a natural fit and natural progression for our company.

There are all types of technology our there including LCD, projection, direct-view LED – and it comes down to keeping the budget in mind but then also keeping in mind what’s going to best serve the overall project in the best possible light.

We work directly, tightly with our designers and the space itself. If there’s a lot of glass windows, projectors are clearly out because they’re never going to push enough lumens in the middle of the day to be bright enough in that space. Yeah, you can build out an LCD matrix wall, but it’s not one big uniform display.

So, for the UConn project, or the recently completed Cook Children’s Hospital project, something like Daktronics direct-view LED display is really an ideal solution because it addresses all situations and serves the purpose of the experience the best.

John talks about the Cook Children’s Hospital project:

I’ve been focused on this project for quite some time to create positive distraction experiences. It’s the idea that kids coming into a hospital can be a scary experience. They might be sick or not feeling well or injured, whatever the case may be. It can be an anxiety inducing experience.

Hospitals are very clean, sterile environments that don’t naturally lend themselves to be fun. So, we’ve been doing a lot of work with mixed-reality types of experiences within care rooms to help give that positive distraction to kids when they’re in those types of environments.

We’ve done interactive coloring walls in a lot of places which allows children to get in front of a screen and color in a space without it being too gamified, but just distracting enough to take their mind off whatever they might be there for. Cook Children’s Hospital has one, actually, in addition to the video wall project.

Ultimately, it’s taking what could be viewed as bad or unfun and making it kind of fun.

For Cook Children’s Hospital, they reached out to us at DI and they’d been working with an architect on a new space that they wanted to be an impactful entry space – something larger than life but also warm and welcoming.

We worked tightly with the hospital and the architect during the discovery phase and learned they were looking for something big, bold and impactful, but also comforting and welcoming. Those two things are kind of at odds with each other, but we were able to find some ways to make it work.

We included the dragon, which is their mascot, to welcome kids as a familiar touchpoint and make them feel a little more comfortable. And then we worked with a turnkey vendor to help with the rest and to bring the project to life.

John goes into much more detail on these projects as well as a project at NAVY in the full podcast episode. Give it a listen to learn more about John, DI and projects we’ve collaborated on:

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