W Dubai

This boutique five-star hotel was created to be an exclusive lifestyle destination for adults and features suave dining and nightlife options, and an eye-catching media facade right under its trademark ‘W’ on the front of the building architecture.

Traxon e:cue commenced work on the W Dubai – Mina Seyahi in January 2018 alongside partners Debbas Electric and lighting design by Alula Lighting. The project was completed in early 2022, in time for the hotel launch in April 2022.

This large-scale media façade measures 100m x 7m It was custom-made to wrap around 3 sides of the building and is made up of a total of 6,500 pieces of the Traxon ARCHISHAPE® 2.0 Dots in M-configuration with a customized RGB LED option for optimal coloured light application.

ARCHISHAPE® 2.0 Dot is a high-brightness, fully customizable media dot solution intended for use in high-quality coloured light applications and is a very cost-effective solution for large scale installations like the façade at W Dubai. It supports nodes with variable pixel pitch with a maximum 4m between nodes. It was paired here with the Traxon e:cue Lighting Control Engine and SYMPL pro Node.

The Lighting Control Engine is an easily mountable device that orchestrates all the fixtures, devices and technologies involved in creating lighting scenes. It has a pre-installed media content package with the ability to synchronize sound-to-light sequences. These can be controlled remotely via mobile devices or with browser access via the built-in web server.

The SYMPL pro Node was specifically designed to withstand harsh weather conditions ranging from minus 40 to 70°C and is therefore a perfect choice for the UAE outdoors. It is an eight-channel DMX / e:pix and RDM interface with 4096 channels that can be powered by an external power supply or via Power-over-Ethernet and connects the Lighting Control Engine and the ARCHISHAPE® 2.0 Dots. This powerful amalgamation of technology and art allows for an eye-catching play of dynamic colours, shapes and patterns including low-resolution images, video and text that can be viewed from a wide panoramic circumference around W Dubai including the ever-packed traffic on Al Sufouh 2 which connects Dubai Media City to the hustle bustle of JBR, as well as the scenic shores of Dubai Harbor.

The installation has therefore proven to be far more than a crowning glory on the building architecture. With its impressively far-reaching visibility and dynamic range of colour-changing options, this media façade is being used as a low-resolution advertising board to convey key messages as well as attract eyeballs on a city skyline populated with impressively striking high-rise architecture competing for attention.