Our Flagship Project

The Burj Al Arab represents the company’s highest profile commercial contract to date. The build cost ran into billions of dollars from the creation of the manmade island to the final décor and opening ceremony.

Our part was to design, implement, commission and supply product for the main multimedia operations of the building. Seven significant public features came under our control; Water and Fire fountains, Fire columns, atrium theatrical lighting, Projection, three water fountains, all external landscape lighting and all internal architectural atrium lighting, public area lighting and the now famous sky restaurant and the most luxurious ballroom dining area.

The brief, simple; for the building, provide an effective timed and sequenced series of events fit to impress royalty. For the operational staff; an intuitive, robust hand held control solution to co-ordinate all the above features into one exceptional display for the arrival of the most supreme VIPs – a series event lasting for 18minutes and 17 seconds – exactly.

The technology used was bleeding edge for the time. Our colleagues managing the individual features were the cream of their respective professions and drew from over six nationalities.

Image projection to the front of the sail was beamed over ¼ of a kilometre from the nearby Jumeirah Beach Hotel using a single mode fibre optic link across the water. The cabling for all the lighting ran to many hundreds of kilometres all requiring specifying, installing, labelling, testing, and terminating.

All the systems were governed by a distributed processing system that minimised any central point of failure. Each processing array of Unix based machines were located in different areas as much as ½ a mile apart.

We drew our team from an international pool of experts. At times over 20 skilled engineers working both at the build site and in their respective countries towards a unified design. We are now an ISO9001 accredited company. This is in no small part due to the disciplines forged during this exceptional project.

Of course our part was infinitesimal in comparison to the overall build programme and some of the structural technologies used were immensely impressive to our binary logical minds. However, we operate as the company who delivers the cream on top for these great projects and we believe we managed to show every element off in their true and brilliant light.