Dataton has supplied its WATCHOUT multimedia content playback solution for a multi-faceted 228m screen in a new Chinese exhibition called Old Beijing Gets Moving.

Located in Beijing's National Conference Centre, the exhibition takes as its inspiration A Glance Round Old Beijing, a panorama of the city as it was in the 1930s, originally created as an extended scrolled image by the painter Wang Daguan. With WATCHOUT blending and synchronising the images of 56 digital video projectors, Daguan's original painting has been brought to life as an animated video in which up to a thousand ancient buildings - including temples, castles, city walls, theatres, shops and people's homes - are enhanced by moving images of the people who once inhabited them as they go about their daily lives.

On entering the exhibition, visitors pass in front of a custom-built projection screen that measures three metres high and is over 228m long. Along its 'journey', the screen takes a number of right-angle turns, allowing visitors to view some parts of the animation in parallel with one another, and giving them a fresh perspective each time they turn a corner.

Kenneth Cheung of Audio Visual Technique, Dataton's local partner, said: "The theme of the exhibition is 'Watch Old Beijing, Love New Beijing'. "Many of the buildings represented in Wang Daguan's original painting are long gone, so the idea was to apply new technology in a way that would bring them back to life for today’s generation."

Adjacent to the new display, three of Wang Daguan's original paintings - 'A General View of Old Tianqiao' and 'Landscape of the Capital and its Environs', as well as 'A Glance Round Old Beijing' - are showcased for comparison, themselves occupying a total length of more than 30m and providing a artistic contrast to the multimediawall.