The Gardens Casino in Hawaiian Gardens, California often hosts major poker tournaments in addition to round-the-clock play in their famed poker room. A recent $90 million renovation added a 200,000-square-foot building with over 300 playing tables, two multi-use halls, a restaurant and bar, a VIP lounge, and a striking, Nixel Series™ Truly Curved LED display from NanoLumens®.
“We needed a display that would allow players to see various sporting events while they played and enable us to market the casino with some eye-catching graphics and content,” explained Ron Sarabi, General Manager at The Gardens Casino. “The best spot to put this display was in our poker room to maximize viewership.”
NanoLumens created a custom Nixel Series™ curved LED screen for the Garden Casino in Hawaiian Gardens, California.
NanoLumens designed the 178-foot by 4.43-foot curved display with a 2.5mm pixel pitch. The screen extends across the top of the poker room’s VIP entrance and is visible from every table in the room. The NanoLumens display is made up of the company’s patented Nixel™, the flexible building blocks. This technology enables slight bending of the display into both convex and concave curves that conform to the display’s mounting surface or create the required curvature.
These building blocks form a genuinely curved display with no gaps or seams. The result, according to NanoLumens, is a better horizon view without any black lines or loss of visibility with a viewing angle up to 160 degrees.
However, the company had to overcome one main design challenge to make the display work in the room.
“The space this display was being placed in wasn’t built for the display size the casino wanted,” said Deseo, Design Engineer at AVI-SPL. “So NanoLumens had to produce a custom, very long and narrow display with a difficult curve radius to make it work in this space.”
For this particular application, NanoLumens designed a custom wall bracket to house the display, and help ensure that the curved screen would fit in the space, that as Deseo explained, “Was not designed and built as a supporting surface for this installation.” In fact, the wall bracket itself had to support the display.
The display integrator, JoJo Deseo of AVI-SPL, had to overcome a few other design challenges as the installation got underway.
“With a display this large we were also tasked with installing some 900 separate tablet-sized Nixel panels that the display would be comprised of,” he said. “Each of the panels had a Nixel count of 100 (w) x 9 (h) for a total of 900 Nixels, with each panel approximately 6” x 9” in size. This had to be done in a very precise manner.”
“This install had to take place while customers were busy gambling,” he said. “Working with these 900 Nixel panels, lifts and the mounting and drilling we were doing was tricky in a public space, while trying not to disrupt the patrons gambling in the casino.”
The Nixel Series Truly Curved LED display can handle up to ten different content sources or can show content from one source across the entire display, and it seamlessly integrates with the additional equipment that feeds the content into the display. AVI-SPL installed this equipment that casual viewers would not notice.
“It was very interesting to work with this display as it was very narrow and very long – not exactly a standard size – and it was designed as one full-size display,” Wyatt from AVI-SPL said.
Wyatt created marketing content to be shown over the full length of the screen, including a 3D animated golden dragon that sprints across its full length.
“The content I create always looks great on NanoLumens screens. With some manufacturers I need to stay away from certain colors because they just don’t pop,” Wyatt said. “But NanoLumens displays are so flexible and viewable from all angles, I don’t have to worry about color as everything pops on their displays.”
He added that working with a curved display opened up some additional creative options as well. “I wasn’t sure initially if I’d be creating content at 30fps but with the curved display the movement looks so smooth and NanoLumens displays handle 60fps no problem,” he said. “The challenge to be creative with this size screen was also fun to tackle.”
Kara Green, NanoLumens Regional Sales Manager, added, “What NanoLumens is able to do with the Nixel Series Truly Curved LED displays is magic. This really was a fantastic install, and the curved display really livens up the space and calls a lot of attention to that area in the casino, and that was the goal.”
For the casino, reliability was required for a system that has to run 24 by 7-365. The Nixel Series display fits the casinos demand for reliability. In addition, the reliable NanoLumens system boasts that it is easy to repair, and NanoLumens backs the system with six-year Nixel to Pixel warranty.
“With a place that is in operation round-the-clock we can’t afford to deal with tech issues and with NanoLumens we don’t have to,” Sarabi, the Garden Casino’s general manager concluded.
