Marine Life Institute — Video, Interactivity Project in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The institute takes visitors through three zones about the Red Sea, The Shallows, Below the Surface and EMERGE, plus a retail area. Most exhibits are looping films: a map of the central Red Sea, animated guides to sea trekking and snorkelling, and the Sea Trek and scuba diving experiences. Others react to the visitor: lifts and a submarine-hangar door that start a show as they move, coral models that respond to touch, and a diving exhibit with a quiz. With ALEC as construction lead and several integrators on site, the institute needed one system to control all of it.

Over a two-year design and build, we supplied and programmed the show control and media playback, working with ALEC and the other contractors. Two PIXILAB servers run PIXILAB Blocks, the museum's control and content management system, which drives 25 Intel NUC media players and controls every LED screen and projector in the building. The screens, projectors and loudspeakers came from another contractor. Each player keeps its content cached locally, so the films carry on playing if the network drops. Three Dataton 4K media servers running WATCHOUT 7 play the projection content.

Blocks also ties in the systems the other integrators installed, including the background music, the evacuation system, the exhibits and the experience audio. Moxa ioLogik remote I/O units bring in signals from the building, such as the lifts and the submarine-hangar door, so their shows start on cue. A schedule screen shows the day's diving trips straight from a Google Calendar.

We also wrote the software for the two camera-based exhibits in Below the Surface. At the coral exhibit, touching one of five coral models starts its projection animation, changes its lighting and shows facts about that coral, with WATCHOUT sending the lighting cues. The diving exhibit is the centrepiece of our work: IR cameras detect when visitors touch three physical objects, and each touch opens animated data sheets and a diving quiz.

Since the handover in July 2026, the institute's films, triggered shows and interactive exhibits, and the systems from the other integrators, all run under one PIXILAB Blocks control system.