The Obama Foundation has selected AV Stumpfl Pixera to unify media playback across Chicago's new presidential museum, spanning a multitude of media exhibits and a four-storey immersive projection piece.
The Obama Presidential Center opened to the public on 19 June 2026 in Chicago's Jackson Park. The Centre rises across eight floors, four of them given over to public museum space, presenting exhibitions that explore the story of President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama through film, interactive displays, and large-scale immersive media.
AV Stumpfl Pixera
media servers drive 35 distinct systems spanning the full breadth of the exhibition programme. The 35-system installation spans 23 single-display exhibits, seven multi-monitor systems and five multi-projector systems. The multi-monitor configurations include systems of up to 11 displays, each running from a single director server and two client units. The five multi-projector systems range from two-projector blends
to the four-storey Power of Words installation.
Across all systems, the Obama Foundation's AV team built custom web-accessible control interfaces within Pixera Control, making routine operations accessible to technicians without requiring in-depth knowledge of the software. Each interface provides the most common operator functions, like starting and stopping timelines, toggling outputs, restarting the render engine, and selecting
photography-safe stills from the video content. The interfaces are available as embedded panels within ISAAC, the museum's integrated control platform, giving operators access to the full media estate from a single location.
Power of Words is the museum's centrepiece installation, running the full interior height of the building across all four gallery floors as a projected canvas
that orients visitors on each level before expanding into themed visuals and artwork that cross every storey simultaneously. The spatial audio design deploys more than 89 speakers across the installation, with audio systems embedded in screens, floors, and in ceiling trenches at each level. Each floor operates as a distinct audio zone, and Pixera synchronises about 40 audio
tracks along with the projected content across the full installation. Pixera also drives coordinated lighting changes for Power of Words via UDP commands sent to the museum's lighting control system, embedding lighting transitions directly within the media timeline.
The projection geometry of Power of Words presented an additional challenge. The screen is wider at the mid-level floors
than at the top and bottom of the building, requiring the media producers to apply different content warps depending on the vertical position of each element on the canvas. To address this, the team developed a workflow using Pixera's NDI live-input capabilities, taking full-resolution After Effects compositions as direct NDI feeds into Pixera and displaying them on
the full-scale screen in real time. Warping corrections and content changes could then be previewed and refined immediately, without the delays of iterative offline renders.
Projector alignment for Power of Words is handled by Scalable Display Technologies, whose software generates MPCDI calibration files that Pixera accepts as part of an automated alignment sequence built through Medialon, the
museum's scheduling and control system operating under ISAAC. When a recalibration is required, Medialon sends commands to a custom module in Pixera, which stops active timelines, deactivates outputs and hands control to Scalable for calibration. Once the alignment process is complete, Pixera reactivates the outputs and restarts the timelines without manual intervention.
Photo Credits: The Obama Foundation