Bumbershoot wanted its 100 foot International Fountain to carry the show, so the whole crowd could share the night without fighting for the front row.

The Bumbershoot Music Festival has been a gem of the Pacific Northwest since 1971, 3 days of music, comedy, art, and food in the heart of Seattle.

NOVA Light Labs answered with projection mapping and live video cast across the fountain's mist, turning falling water into something close to a hologram. For several years it rose luminous over the grounds each night of the festival.

Every night NOVA turned 100 feet of falling water into a screen.

Live video from the Fisher Pavilion and Stadium Main Stage projected onto the mist from both sides, reading clearly from a full 360 degrees for a near holographic effect.

Guests watched the performance rise out of the water like a hologram from anywhere on the grounds, a relaxed vantage for families, ADA members, and beer garden patrons who wanted the show with more room.

Nearby, a grove of 4 story trees came alive under 100 feet of projected light, each leaf a pixel carrying live footage of the stage across the canopy.

The content ran in 2 modes, live performance and interstitial.

During sets, NOVA carried the stage onto the water, projecting ODESZA, Flume, Lorde, Explosions in the Sky, and rock legend Billy Idol across the fountain.

Between them, custom interstitial visuals took over, abstract forms from Bumbershoot's branding woven with interactive 3D camera work, so guests walking past folded into the display.

Live video across multiple projectors at this scale is a system problem before it is an art problem.

Wireless video ran into a custom application with under 1 ms of latency, splitting the feed across the projector array and recombining it precisely on the moving surface of the fountain.

The signal chain held across every night of the run.