Robin Taylor of VideoMon with the invisible presenter, part of the huge production team that created SHRM’s Imagination 2000

Las Vegas is no stranger to illusion. The gambling and entertainment destination thrives on altered reality and the indulgent imagination of show designers. As a result, Sin City sets high expectations among its visitors. When a convention comes to town, the attendees expect the showmanship to spill over into their conference sessions. They expect more than the run-of-the-mill ballroom dog-and-pony shows that characterize so many professional confabs. They expect to be surprised, entertained and even astonished. In short, Las Vegas puts a lot of pressure on presentations.

Last June, when the Society for Human Resources Management jetted into town, expectations were running high among its 20,000 attending members. To suit the setting and set the tone for the fast-changing nature of the human-resources profession, the SHRM chose “Imagination 2000” as the theme for its 52nd annual conference. The job fell to Lisa Block, director of meetings and conferences, to whip up a milieu and a mood that would, in her words, “motivate, educate, inspire, develop identity, instill pride and promote the values of the organization.” In addition, says Block, the attendees like to have some fun.

Williams/Gerard Productions of Washington, DC, was lead producer for the event, which involved live, real-time virtual reality presented with a series of Roadie projectors from Christie Digital Systems to an audience of more than 12,000 SHRM members. Block admits that Imagination 2000 may not have been the most imaginative theme ever created for a conference, but it gave her, her team, the producers and the technicians plenty of creative elbow room. The venue could not have been more devoid of inspiration. The “auditorium” was the 600-foot-long, cavernous and featureless main floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center. The main hall is used typically for trade-show exhibitions, but in the case of the SHRM meeting, it was configured to seat 15,000 people in front of a 60-by-48-foot raised stage. A white cyclorama ran the width of the stage, with a 10-foot wrap added to each side. More than 400 lighting fixtures were hung from a custom-built grid. With that basic and bland room configuration, it was up to the SHRM team and the producers to create a series of live presentations that would compete with the volcanoes, pirate ships, palazzos and pyramids on the Las Vegas Strip.

Supercomputer Transport Block, a veteran of 11 SHRM conferences, knew more than six months before the event that she wanted to make a significant departure from the sort of video and graphics shows the organization had staged in the past. She had recently attended a conference in which the images of the live speakers on the stage were combined with CGI and video backgrounds. Block was intrigued by the imaginative possibilities of the VR technology. “I thought it could take us to places that we couldn’t go in reality,” she says. “We wanted to transport the audience, to get them to think about things in a different way, to use their imaginations.” Block retained the services of Williams/Gerard Productions in Washington, DC, as the lead producer for the conference presentation. Williams/Gerard developed the visual theme, the video and graphics, set design and management of the conference. It also acted as the contractor for the many third-party producers and technicians necessary to stage the elaborate four-day event.

“Lisa wanted to do something different for the members,” recalls Brian Congrove, executive producer for Williams/Gerard. “She wanted not only to get their attention, but to give them the feeling that there is always something new and fun ahead. She wanted to keep them wondering what would happen next.” VideoMon, an engineering and production company in Scottsdale, Arizona, was brought in to handle the staging, call the show and integrate the VR effects into the rest of the presentations. The technology itself was supplied by Mirage Digital, a Phoenix company that developed a one-of-a-kind portable VR system. Dubbed the Virtual Fly Pack, the Mirage Digital system incorporates two SGI Onyx II supercomputers. According to Mirage Digital’s president, John Fassett, the only other organization that has modified Onyx servers for road shows is the U.S. Army.

Similar VR systems are used in broadcasting to generate special effects, but in that case, installation takes weeks and involves highly trained technicians. The system used at the SHRM conference was up and running in four hours, says Fassett. The servers travel in custom-designed flight cases while the components racks are pre-wired with more than 360 connections. This eliminates the time-consuming task of patching together the system each time it is run. Fassett notes that the technology used to generate real-time 3D animation effects at the Las Vegas show involved more than $2 million worth of equipment.

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