Everyone in events is familiar with large-scale projection mapping; on buildings, on stage, and at activations. But there’s almost limitless potential to tell your story on a much more personal scale. Sharing a meal is one of the most intimate human social rituals, and projection mapping onto the dinner table is emerging as a fantastic way to communicate, delight, and impress your audience.

At Encore Event Technologies, we’ve been teaming up our amazing digital artists with our high-definition projectors and tech crew to create breathtaking, Insta-worthy, wildly shareable content that transforms any meal into a multimedia event.

Brand Activations

For Dom Pérignon, we took the long and storied history of the company and used its immediately identifiable visuals to completely brand a dinner for 100 VIPs at Sydney’s Ivy Ballroom. Personalised name cards in the shape of the Dom Pérignon logo were projected onto place settings, followed by custom graphics perfectly aligned with crockery, cutlery, and glassware. Each course had its own projected content, complementing the menu and highlighting the decadence of Dom Pérignon Champagne. The original animation was produced by Studiorats in the Netherlands and reproduced for the Dom Pérignon event in Sydney.

At the National Convention Centre Canberra, we used the colours and images associated with the annual Enlighten Festival of outdoor art, illumination, and culture to personalise a lunch for 40 special guests, selling Canberra as a destination for world-class business events. Local food and wine were complemented by animations, with each dinner plate individually lit for impact. Guests’ names were projected onto their seats, offering a unique personal touch and making networking easy. The autumnal colours of Canberra and signature looks of client InterContinental Hotels Group were all incorporated to the projection mapped content to take event personalisation to the next level.

To help global hotel giant The Accor Group tell their story, we staged a one-off special event at the Pullman Reef Hotel Casino, Cairns, for 10 influential clients. We partnered with Belgian creative geniuses Skull Mapping to license their viral sensation ‘Le Petit Chef’ , and built a reef theme in a function room using lighting and set elements, highlighting the natural beauty of the region. Guests were then utterly stunned when their ‘tablecloth’ turned into one of Le Petit Chef’s animated adventures. The VIPs were so impressed, they asked to see the animation a further four times!

The cutting edge

Table projection is still such a fresh technique that most guests (and event producers!) are still to experience it live. It’s an utterly entrancing spectacle that has everyone whipping out their devices and saturating social media with images and video. It has an amazing power to communicate your brand, personalise an event to a micro level, and tell any story; the creators of Le Petit Chef are even using it for two-hour dinner shows that trace the culinary discoveries of Marco Polo!

For maximum impact, content creators, event planners, and the tech team have to work very closely – table projections have tolerances in the millimetres, and the biggest implementations have pixel counts in the millions! Encore Event Technologies have learnt through practical experience how to make large scale table projection mapping work, and would love to partner with more event planners to create unforgettable experiences.