Esports Projection Mapping for Tournament Stages and Game Launches

Esports fans spend their lives in front of screens, so one more screen on stage won’t impress them. What does is a venue that behaves like the game itself: walls that react to every kill, a facade the crowd can play on, and a player walkout that looks like a level loading in.

We produce projection for tournament organizers, game publishers, teams and the sponsor agencies behind them, from the main stage to the launch party and the fan zone outside. If you have a title, a bracket or a launch date, tell us about your event.

Esports projection mapping takes game art and live gameplay off the monitor and maps them onto the stage, the room or the building, so the whole venue plays the match. The part that matters most is the feed. At the Tropicana, our in-house creative designers were entrusted with executing the gaming imagery and live-feeding the content so that the game could be played in real time.

The content also has to work as game art at a much larger size. Video game visuals, also known as game art production, real time 3D graphics, and simulation graphics design, focus on clarity, performance, and real-time rendering constraints. We build for those constraints, so the projected game stays readable to the back row and to the broadcast camera.

• Live gameplay at venue scale. Game feeds are warped to fit the real surface, the way our custom server adapted the content feed to the forced perspective of a casino tower.
• Stage moments on cue. Activations can be timed to gates, player entrances, halftime beats, or sponsor callouts for maximum impact, which maps neatly onto team walkouts, round breaks and finals.
• Playable fan games. Four-screen Unreal Engine games networked with shared leaderboards give the crowd something to compete in between matches.
• Crowd-watched play. Two-screen story experiences let one user play while a crowd watches the outcome above.
• Micro-video games. We use Unreal Engine to make "micro-video games" where your audience can manipulate the visuals through their movement or touch.
• Scores that follow the fan home. A universal QR and randomly generated ID pulls up each guest's score, which works for leaderboard reveals and post-show CRM triggers.

Tournament stages. The stage is where projection meets the broadcast. For sports venues we design content that reads instantly on camera, and mapped content is modular, allowing you to swap messaging by team, city, or sponsor without rebuilding physical structures. Scenic set extension is covered in more depth on stage projection mapping, and arena-scale work on stadium projection mapping.

Game launches. A launch has to introduce a world, so the projection becomes that world for a night. A building facade, a club or a convention hall can carry the game's environments, characters and key art, with playable moments built in.

Fan zones and entrances. Fans remember how they arrived. We can take a static projection tunnel and embed motion sensors so timeline events fire as guests walk past.

Visuals that respond to a live camera or a game engine are on real-time projection mapping, audio-reactive shows on music synced projection mapping, and touch and motion play on interactive projection mapping. Film and series adaptations of games are covered on film premiere projection mapping.

• The world's largest video game screen at the Tropicana, Las Vegas, 2022. We worked with a Los Angeles creative agency that specializes in content and events for the gaming industry. The display was recorded as 47,397 square feet, beat the previous record by over 8,000 square feet and was live-streamed to tens of thousands of viewers around the globe. Thirty-eight Barco projectors and a few spares, fifty units in total, were blended, warped and mapped, and athletes and celebrities on hand played the game as a multiplayer match.
• A 360° nightclub for the League of Legends All Stars afterparty, Mansion 54, Las Vegas. For MasterCard's League of Legends All Stars afterparty, a panoramic 360 projection display encased the main hall with custom visuals. Two additional 4K projectors were installed for an entrance tunnel built from two 8ft x 18ft projection screens, a wormhole into an alternate reality.

See all our projects.

Send us the venue, the dates, the title and how the event will be streamed. We will come back with where projection belongs on the stage, in the fan zone and at the entrance, and what each should show. See every surface we map on our projection mapping services page, or contact our team to begin.