First World War in Flanders Fields Museum

"As the museum is open ten hours a day, we wanted to have reliability, longevity with no image degradation."

Nicolas Vanden Avenne, Managing Director at Ocular BVBA

The completely new permanent exhibition in the In Flanders Fields Museum gives generous attention to the most recent museum applications; touch screens, interactive poppy bracelet, video projection, soundscapes, etc. – all contributing to an intense experience and an authentic submersion in front life.

“Every projection in this museum is a technical challenge. There is not any projection on a flat surface. It’s all curved, it’s all bended. To achieve the exhibit areas, Vanden Avenne says, we had to look for a partner that could do the engineering of our projections and cooperate with us during the building of the museum. We turned to projectiondesign because of their high-performance projectors for each exhibit area and choice of lenses.”

Lifelike characters and interactive installations confront the visitor with life and death in the Ypres front region and the consequences of The Great War, a century ago. The museum tells its story in two ways; through people and through the present day war landscape, the latter being the last tangible witness of the war history.

“To really embrace the whole public with the impact of landscape then I think the best way of doing it is with projection. That is what we’ve done here. People are really thrilled with the experience and that is largely due to the techniques we’ve chosen to present it”, says Piet Chielens, Coordinator at the In Flanders Fields Museum.

The newly opened In Flanders Fields Museum uses F35 wqxga (2560 x 1600) resolution projector in the First Battle exhibit to project from the ceiling onto a 3D scale model map of the battlefields from the North Sea to the front line. Ypres Saliant uses three projectiondesign F22 1080p projectors and WB1920 processors onto a 170-degree curved screen to observe the progress of the war as if travelling in a balloon high in the sky. The most harrowing exhibit the Third battle, uses four F22 1080p projectors onto a curved screen and ceiling to provide symbolic visuals with narration by nurses, doctors, soldiers, priests about one of the bloodiest battles in the First World War.