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LOOP Immersive Sound Lounge

  • 2019 – 2019
  • L-Acoustics Creations
  • Concept

L-Acoustics is the global leader in premium audio, collaborating with the world’s most renowned performing arts centres and music venues.

L-Acoustics Creations – a division within the company – is developing sound technologies with an unrivalled sonic signature and advanced Immersive Hyperreal Sound for residential, cultural and experiential spaces.

Originally created for professional venues, L-Acoustics’ audio solutions have been reconfigured as the Island, a personal auditorium with a multichannel platform.

The Island’s signature edition – LOOP – is the first collaboration between L-Acoustics Creations and Zaha Hadid Virtual Reality Group (ZHVR), a specialist research unit within Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) dedicated to exploring the new possibilities of emerging immersive technologies.

LOOP marries the highest resolution audio of L-Acoustics’ Immersive Sound Art (L-ISA) with ZHA’s signature design language and the studio’s ongoing development of innovative new concepts.

Concealed beneath LOOP’s fluid exterior is an array of cutting-edge hardware and software. L-ISA Bubbles technology goes back to the fundamentals of musical reproduction by ensuring playback fully restores the richly layered, multidimensional characteristics of contemporary professional recording. Encoded in the proprietary Blu 23.1 format, BluBubbles delivers a powerful concert-level experience within a personal environment.

Listening to faultless audio of unprecedented clarity, dynamics and realism via 24 independent channels, LOOP enables users to experience sound from the perspective of the artist or to be become totally immersed in the most realistic audio while watching a movie.

ZHVR has drawn inspiration from natural forms and contemporary engineering to define LOOP’s curvilinear geometries which seamlessly incorporate L-Acoustics` technology while elevating the unit off the ground as if floating. Integrated lighting accentuates this effect and modulates illumination according to use.

LOOP is available in a variety finishes ranging from hand-crafted wood to carbon fibre; its detailing and selection of materials designed to provide optimal acoustic performance.

A ZHVR pilot project, LOOP’s design process involved VR workflow developed by the group; from initial sketches using immersive modelling software to mixed reality simulations allowing evaluation of the design’s ergonomics and materiality. At any point within its development process, all iterations, including the technological collaborator’s input, could be presented to the client as immersive, high-definition VR demonstrations.

Architect

ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS

Design

Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher

Zaha Hadid Virtual Reality (ZHVR) Group

Design Team: Aleksandra Mnich, Leonid Krykhtin, Helmut Kinzler