It’s Not a “Booth”, It’s a Spaceship

Forty-six tons of rigging, truss and hoists. 28, 000 square feet of usable floor space. 700 lighting fixtures. 200 LED tiles. Two stories of conference rooms, product displays and demonstration labs.

If we didn’t know better, we’d put up our tray tables, buckle up and prepare for lift-off.

At the biggest orthopedic meeting of the year, Zimmer Biomet’s “booth” at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) was an impressive piece of design, construction, engineering which delivered a jaw dropping coming out party for the newly merged Zimmer Biomet.

Riverview Systems Group, the company that designed and built Zimmer’s multi-media theatrical event also builds live event experiences for the likes of Cisco and Google.

It showed. Walking into Zimmer’s experience was like walking onto the stage set of a different world. It was an orthopedic theater-in-the-round calibrated to be quieter, more focused and strangely disconnected from the bustling trade show outside the bounds of its lush, white carpeting.

How did Zimmer pull it off? This year, OTW had a chance to peek behind the curtain and learn how, who and what created this experiential and complex event.

AAOS 2016

The Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS) is the largest orthopedic surgeon and company meeting of the year. Approximately 15, 000 people attend annually. This year’s March meeting was in Orlando, Florida.

Moving in Day: Thursday, February 25

AAOS’s exhibit hall opened for business on March 2, 2016. But five days before that was Zimmer Biomet’s moving in day. It took 25 semi-tractor trailers to convey 46 tons of booth equipment. At the end of that first “36 hour day” the bare cement floor of the Orlando Convention center was covered with rigging, boxes, lights and…well, here are the pictures.

One Year in Planning

One year before those semi-tractor trailers rolled into Orlando, Evan Williams, co-founder of Riverview Systems Group, was putting in motion this massive event. Zimmer Biomet hired his company to design, create and supervise this logistical campaign. This was Williams’ 18th AAOS.

He explained to OTW that he and Zimmer Biomet were hoping to create a “coming out party for the merged Zimmer and Biomet.” As Williams explained it: “We wanted to create a space that invited people in and gave them a comfortable oasis within the hectic AAOS exhibit floor. We were hoping to give surgeons an experience that they may not have expected.”

Riverview was founded in 1987 by theater technology veterans Williams and Chris Thorne. For this year’s Zimmer Biomet booth, Williams built a massive theater worthy of Broadway or London’s West End and invited surgeons to come on stage.

To create the illusion of a different world, all the equipment had to be assembled and hoisted out of sight—literally hundreds of feet into the air.

When surgeons entered the Zimmer Biomet experience, they found themselves in the middle of a multi-media experience. Under the floors and hidden behind elements of the construction were miles and miles of wiring, electronics, sensors and lights.

Big Blue and “Z”

There are two basic design elements that comprise the Zimmer brand. The color blue and the letter “Z”. So several hundred blue lights, suspended out of sight, bathed everyone and everything in an ocean of blue light.

Also suspended but clearly visible was a massive, space ship sized letter “Z”. In these pictures, the Riverview crew is building the circular frame to hold the Zimmer “Z”. When they were done and with all the blue lights, the Zimmer “Z” appeared to float like an apparition above the floor.

All of the lights, programming and LED panels were controlled by banks of computers in a control room.

It took four days to assemble, test and debug everything. Considering how massive and complex this theatrical experience became, that has to be record time.

The pièce de résistance was the six LED panels on rollers that displayed a mesmerizing show just under the floating big “Z”. Each panel was 14 feet tall and 7 feet wide. They were huge. Computer controlled, they showed a video piece which advertised the Zimmer Biomet brand and products using, of course, patient stories and product images.

The panels moved in concert with the video. Separately each panel would highlight a type of patient or product or concept. Then they would roll together to create a unified concept—soaring dancers, for example.

We asked Evan Williams if he was going to take a short vacation after this. He said “no.” As soon as AAOS ended, he was headed to San Diego—the site for next year’s AAOS—to start working on the next amazing Zimmer Biomet live event experience.

It takes a year and hundreds of workers to create this five days of living theater.

All the orthopedic surgeons who toured the Zimmer Biomet AAOS event (and there were thousands) received a truly amazing experience.

If you want to get a sense of what it was like: check out this video from Riverview and Zimmer Biomet.

Project Credits:

• Zimmer Biomet Convention Services Team: George Schwenk, Jessica Barger, Ricardo Case, Lee Walker
• Production Design & Execution by Riverview Systems Group
• Exhibit Design and Construction by Catalyst Exhibits
• Exhibit Installation and Dismantle by Tru Service Group
• Media by Varipix
• Automation Engineering by TAIT
• Rigging by Stage Rigging, Inc.