NOVA Light Labs designed an immersive projection mapping room inside a shipping container, built to endure the open desert for the ages.

A private collector wanted an immersive art experience that could debut at Burning Man and live out in the open. Rugged, self reliant, and small enough to fit a single shipping container.

NOVA answered with a projection mapping system tuned to the inch, where short throw laser projectors wrap every surface in light. Inside, the steel walls dissolve into coral reefs, redwood canopy, and the drift of the cosmos.

Inside the container, sound rises and the walls come alive with light.

Guests settle onto a custom circular bed as the room closes around them. Coral reefs, redwood forest, and the cosmos unfold across every surface.

Each scene arrives with its own sound and the effect is total. NOVA tuned the placement of every projector to erase shadows and hold a pixel perfect calibration, so the light is all that remains and the wonder holds.

Every scene was crafted to transport, from rainforest to open reef to the view from orbit.

The client wanted the rainforest at the press of a button, the ocean floor with the next, and the Earth from above with the last.

NOVA developed 20 custom visuals from a handful of bullet points and reference images, refined through a signature iterative process with sign off at every step.

Original renders and carefully treated footage were upscaled and layered into 20 to 30 minute pieces that loop without a visible seam.

The tight dimensions of a shipping container demanded a system design that was pixel perfect to the inch.

Like every permanent installation, this project began with an exacting 3D model that placed each short throw laser projector and mapped every surface in advance. Photo realistic renders went out to every team, so nothing was left to chance when inches were the margin.

Once the design was cleared, NOVA specified the components and directed the build, handing a complete blueprint to the builder team that turned it into reality. NOVA oversaw the projection mapping and commissioning so every projected image landed on its mark.

The system was engineered to run itself. On power it boots and calibrates, and a single remote steps through scenes, sound, and playback, so the installation runs for hours without a keyboard in sight.