Hard Rock Café London, the original venue of the landmark brand, has just reopened after extensive renovations. Among the upgrades, the Basement Bar now sports a custom-made Element Labs VersaTILE wall, supplied and installed by Projected Image Digital (PID).

Paula Reason of London-based Cadmium Design, the design firm behind many of the Hard Rock Café interiors worldwide, designed the interior. Reason wanted a central light feature in the bar in keeping with an ongoing Hard Rock theme of using light to interact “live” with Hard Rock patrons.

Reason was drawn to VersaTILEs due to their color-changing, smooth effects. She also liked the idea of using a stage lighting technology product to address the Hard Rock theme. “The quality of the light produced by the VersaTILEs is really rich and beautiful. They give exactly the effect and ambience I envisioned,” says Reason.

The back wall of the bar is covered in VersaTILEs, with three different sized screens (one plasma and two TFTs) embedded into tile-patterned wall. The “Versa Wall” spans the bar at 4m by 1m, with each VersaTILE measuring 10x10cm. Each VersaTILE is edge lit with 18 LEDs: six red, six green, and six blue.

Video inputs are fed into the “Versa Wall” via an Element Labs C1 controller, specified by PID. It has a Compact Flash card memory and can store up to 256 individual patterns. For the screen content, Reason selected about 12 sequences of videoclips from Beacon and Amorphous collections. PID’s Rob Fowler programmed these into the C1 using Element Labs’ Rastermapper software.

The resulting VersaWall provides a lighting effect to entertain bar patrons, as the Tiles shift color continuously.

“We are very proud to have been involved in the new look Hard Rock Café…it is now rewarding that Paula’s design just looks fabulous–creating a truly immersive environment to the basement bar,” says PID’s David March.