Case Study
IMAX Corporation
Transforming streaming technology into an immersive home theatre experience across a commanding 2,000-square-foot island exhibit at NAB 2025
Pure Exhibits designed and built IMAX's custom 40×50 island exhibit at NAB 2025 — Booth #W1401 at the Las Vegas Convention Center — creating a cinematic destination that brought IMAX's Streaming & Consumer Technology division to life for 55,000 media and entertainment professionals from 160 countries. The exhibit showcased StreamAware, StreamSmart, and VisionScience technologies through an enclosed theatre, interactive 65" OLED demo stations, and a residential-inspired living room meeting space that translated cinema-grade visual quality into the language of the home.
The Challenge
Creating Intimacy at Scale
IMAX's challenge at NAB 2025 was fundamentally paradoxical — how do you make 2,000 square feet of convention space feel like a living room? The NAB Show floor is the epicenter of media and entertainment technology, drawing 55,000 registered professionals from 160 countries and nearly 1,100 exhibitors including Adobe, AWS, Canon, Cisco, and Sony — all competing for the attention of the broadcasters, streaming platform engineers, and consumer electronics decision-makers who control how audiences experience content at home. For IMAX's Streaming & Consumer Technology division, the stakes were existential: demonstrating that StreamAware, StreamSmart, and VisionScience technologies could deliver theatre-quality visuals on home devices required an environment that itself felt residential, not industrial.
The brief demanded an enclosed theatre for premium demonstrations with controlled lighting and immersive audio, two interactive stations featuring 65" OLED HDR 4K displays running real-time StreamAware and StreamSmart comparisons, a private living room meeting space for high-value partnership conversations, a VisionScience education area built around the proprietary Viewer Score metric, and prominent display of IMAX's Emmy award — all within a cinematic environment that maintained the premium brand standard IMAX has spent nearly six decades establishing worldwide. The booth needed to serve two fundamentally different audiences simultaneously: the broadcast engineer who evaluates streaming infrastructure at the protocol level, and the content executive who needs to see the consumer-facing experience that IMAX Enhanced delivers on certified devices through partnerships with Disney+ and major studios.
"IMAX Enhanced brings the IMAX experience home — theatre-quality visuals, immersive DTS:X audio, and expanded aspect ratios on certified devices. It's not a compromise. It's the next chapter."
— IMAX Streaming & Consumer Technology, NAB 2025
The Creative Journey
From Cinema to Living Room
The Cinematic Color System
Deploying a palette that evokes the experience of sitting in an IMAX theatre. Deep navy walls absorbed ambient light and created a controlled visual environment, while electric cyan blue — IMAX's signature Science Blue — was used at architectural scale on entrance portals, backlit display panels, and the angular two-tier overhead signage. The contrast between the dark, immersive surfaces and the brilliant blue accents replicated the transition from a darkened theatre to the moment the IMAX logo fills the screen — an emotional trigger every IMAX fan recognizes. The palette was not merely decorative but functional: in a convention hall flooded with overhead fluorescent light, the dark-walled booth created a light-controlled enclave where OLED displays and LED video content could be evaluated under conditions approaching the calibrated viewing environments that broadcast engineers and colorists demand.
Five Zones, One Journey
Dividing the 2,000-square-foot island into five distinct experiential zones: a fully enclosed home theatre with controlled lighting and premium audio for immersive StreamAware and StreamSmart demonstrations, two standing demo stations with 65" OLED HDR 4K displays showcasing real-time streaming quality comparisons, a VisionScience interactive education area built around the proprietary Viewer Score metric, a residential-style living room meeting space with branded furniture and ambient lighting, and a prominent welcome counter featuring IMAX's Emmy award. The zoned architecture ensured that a broadcaster evaluating live-streaming quality tools and a consumer electronics partner exploring IMAX Enhanced device certification could have simultaneously immersive, uninterrupted experiences — each zone acoustically and visually separated while remaining navigable from a single central circulation path.
VisionScience on Display
Creating the exhibit's most information-dense feature — a large-format VisionScience wall presenting the AI-powered visual enhancement platform through an educational graphic system designed for a technically literate NAB audience. The centerpiece: the IMAX Viewer Score, a proprietary 0–100 metric displaying a "96" rating against a color spectrum ranging from "Annoying" to "Good" — translating subjective visual quality into a quantifiable, actionable number that streaming platform engineers and content delivery architects could immediately contextualize. Movie poster grids showcasing Disney+ IMAX Enhanced titles flanked the display, while navy lounge seating with branded IMAX pillows created a comfortable consultation zone where content partners could explore XVS™ technology, StreamAware optimization algorithms, and device certification requirements in technical depth.
The Dramatic Eye
Anchoring the exhibit with a massive eye imagery installation — a photographic display approximately 8–10 feet wide showing a human eye reflecting IMAX content, crowned with "A Game Changer" messaging. This single visual communicated IMAX's entire VisionScience proposition: that their technology sees every frame exactly as the human eye perceives it, and that the Viewer Score is built on the science of human visual perception rather than engineering benchmarks alone. Positioned at the booth's most visible corner — the intersection of two primary NAB traffic aisles — the eye installation drew foot traffic from across the West Hall and created an immediate emotional connection before any technical conversation began. Glass-walled demo rooms flanking the installation allowed the dramatic imagery to serve as a backdrop for live product demonstrations, creating a layered visual experience that communicated both brand ambition and technical capability simultaneously.
The full 40×50 island exhibit at Booth #W1401 — a cinematic environment in deep navy and electric blue, featuring enclosed theatre demonstrations, VisionScience interactive displays, 65" OLED demo stations, and glass-walled meeting rooms that brought IMAX Streaming & Consumer Technology to the NAB 2025 show floor.
Gallery
The Booth in Detail
Booth Walkthrough
Experience the Booth
A full walkthrough of the IMAX 40×50 custom island exhibit at NAB 2025 — showcasing the cinematic navy-and-electric-blue color palette, angular two-tier overhead signage, enclosed theatre demo room with premium audio, VisionScience interactive display wall, living room meeting space, dramatic eye imagery installation, 65" OLED demo stations, and the full scope of IMAX Streaming & Consumer Technology brought to life at Booth #W1401 on the Las Vegas Convention Center show floor.
Impact & Results
By the Numbers
Cinematic Quality, Living Room Comfort. One Unforgettable Exhibit.
NAB 2025 gave IMAX its most strategically important platform of the year — the singular gathering where broadcasters, streaming platforms, consumer electronics manufacturers, and content creators converge to evaluate the technologies that will define how audiences experience media for the next decade. The 40×50 island exhibit at Booth #W1401 delivered on the paradox at the heart of IMAX's consumer technology strategy: it made 2,000 square feet of convention space feel like a private screening room. The enclosed theatre transported visitors into a controlled environment where StreamAware's real-time streaming quality optimization and StreamSmart's intelligent delivery algorithms could be evaluated under the precise lighting, audio, and display conditions that broadcast engineers and platform architects require — removing the ambient noise, visual clutter, and compromised viewing angles that render most convention floor demonstrations meaningless for serious technical evaluation.
The VisionScience display gave technical decision-makers the data-driven proof points they needed — including the Viewer Score metric that translates subjective visual quality into a quantifiable, actionable number. For streaming platform engineers accustomed to evaluating compression artifacts, bitrate curves, and encoding profiles, the 0–100 Viewer Score offered something unprecedented: a single metric grounded in human visual perception science that could serve as a shared language between content creators, device manufacturers, and distribution platforms. The XVS™ technology demonstrations showed how AI-powered visual enhancement could be applied across the entire content pipeline — from camera to cloud to living room screen — creating a unified quality standard that didn't depend on any single link in the delivery chain.
The living room meeting space turned high-value partnership conversations from transactional pitches into comfortable, residential-feeling consultations — a deliberate design choice that reflected IMAX's core proposition: that cinema-quality experiences belong in the home. And the dramatic eye installation — visible from across the West Hall — ensured that every one of the 55,000 attendees from 160 countries knew exactly where IMAX was, and what they stood for. In a convention hall dominated by competing claims about 4K, HDR, AI upscaling, and immersive audio, the eye communicated the simplest and most powerful message of all: IMAX technology is built for how the human eye actually sees.