Watchfire Signs Wins Award for Fremont Street Canopy

Watchfire Signs, a provider of exterior and interior LED signs, announces its Fremont Street Experience Canopy project in Las Vegas was named the Specialty Construction Best Product 2020 Southwest by Engineering News-Record (ENR).

ENR, which reports on the $11.25 trillion global construction industry, said that 74 entries were vying for top awards in 19 categories. Winners will be celebrated on Nov. 10 at the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel.

The Fremont Street Canopy is the largest single video screen in the world, with more than 130,000 square feet of digital signage. Watchfire Signs was selected from among 15 digital screen manufacturers from around the world to reimagine and manufacture a rebuilt canopy.

The $30 million project includes 64,000 custom-designed 27mm modules containing 16.3 million pixels and 49 million LEDs. To fit the original structure, Watchfire designed LED panels capable of being trimmed to avoid obstacles protruding through the display. The display technology is engineered to ignore display data going to any missing segments, creating a seamless image.

“This was an especially challenging project because we were tasked with creating an all-new product that allows daylight to pass through the canopy to the street below, without allowing this light to affect the screen’s viewability,” says Pattabi Doraiswamy, vice president of R&D for Watchfire Signs. “To do this, Watchfire designed a product that took advantage of the screen’s viewing angles to make daylight passing through the display modules nearly imperceptible.”

The Fremont Street Experience canopy entertains more than 20 million visitors annually. Adjacent to 10 casinos and more than 60 restaurants, the digital canopy is 1,500 feet long and is suspended 90 feet above a pedestrian mall. A light and audio show by Viva Vision plays every hour in the evening, and SlotZilla operates zip lines the length of the canopy.

A timelapse video of the installation can be viewed here.