Case Studies:

The Royal Opera House, London

Rotronics completed a project to replace the ageing “surtitle system” at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. This system enhances an audience's enjoyment by projecting an English translation of the libretto onto a proscenium arch mounted screen and on to overhead, fingerboard and seat-back mounted LCD displays.

Rotronics developed a suite of software allowing the Libretto text to be created, edited, monitored and distributed. We also designed and manufactured the custom overhead displays for the system These use an almost uniquely narrow, high resolution, TFT, LCD monitor, sometimes described as a “letter box display”. The use of this monitor has allowed overhead displays to be sited in the Stalls Circle, an area which has very limited headroom and where standard format displays would have represented a hazard to audiences as they moved in and out of their seats.

The new software had to be “backwards compatible” with the finger board and seatback displays from the old system with it's unusual text file format . We therefore also developed a file conversion facility allowing the continued use of the existing libretto texts files, thus preventing Royal Opera House staff wasting countless hours recreating the existing Libretto text files.

The Royal Opera House, Oman

In 2015 we were asked to adapt the ROH London system for the Opera House in Muscat, Oman to display both English and Arabic surtitles. This led onto developing replacement 7" touch screen seat back displays intended to eventually replace the existing 1200 modules in Oman.