To celebrate its milestone 60th anniversary, Malaysia’s Public Bank Bhd transformed downtown Kuala Lumpur with a large-scale projection mapping spectacular, augmented reality, and synchronized drone performances across multiple locations. Sixty Barco projectors meticulously aligned and synchronized through Dataton WATCHOUT 7 delivered pixel-perfect imagery across the façades.
Content and AR development for the mammoth event was by Framemotion Studio, with longtime WATCHOUT users Pixel World handling the technical planning and system setup.
“Planning for this project began five months earlier, in September 2025,” explains Eric Chan, Technical Designer, Pixel World. “It was a long process involving seven different versions of the technical plan to address various site challenges and safety concerns. In the early stages, we proposed using 50 projectors, but to achieve the perfect lux balance at the final sites, we ultimately deployed 60 projectors across three locations.”
Solving content and cable challenges
The project was split into three locations: the 20th floor of a building, an empty car park, and the middle of the road. Timecode was used to sync Dataton WATCHOUT and WATCHPAX 30 media servers with the AR development and the drone show.
“Because it was impossible to run cables across these areas, we used wireless AP point-to-point to link the sites. WATCHOUT 7 was perfect for this—the synchronization between the server systems was perfectly stable even over wireless,” says Eric Chan.
With content packages exceeding 100GB, multiple locations and a tight installation schedule, transferring assets wirelessly quickly proved impractical.
“The video assets were extremely large. Sending these over the wireless network was taking too long, so I adapted the workflow by using a laptop as the WATCHOUT Asset Manager. I physically went to each location to upload the content via cable, which was much faster and kept the project on schedule.”
Smart workflows pay off
The Pixel World team routed 4K outputs to Nvidia Mosaic to split the signals, using WATCHOUT virtual displays for all blending and warping across the entire projection canvas.
“WATCHOUT 7 also saved us a lot of time thanks to its separated asset system. The person updating the content and the person doing the mapping could work at the same time without interfering with each other, so no time was wasted.”
Months of planning, days onsite and hours of calibration culminated in a spectacular celebration – and earned the Malaysian National Record for the largest projection mapping on a building. To quote the Pixel World team: “Go Mapping!”
Behind the scenes:
