Panasonic Holovis Gunwharf Quays brings Panasonic Connect’s laser projection technology together with immersive-experience specialist Holovis inside a geodesic dome on the Portsmouth waterfront, running Pumpkinville now and switching to Christmasville for the festive season. The installation relies on Panasonic’s laser projectors to transform the dome’s interior into fully enclosed, 360-degree theatrical sets for each holiday.
Panasonic Holovis Gunwharf Quays: A Dome That Changes With the Seasons
The ApolloDomes structure at Gunwharf Quays currently hosts Pumpkinville, a live immersive Halloween spectacular, before switching over to Christmasville for the festive season. Both productions wrap guests in projected environments, haunted forests and jack-o-lantern-lit clearings for Halloween, a chocolate-box Victorian village scene for Christmas, rather than relying on a fixed physical set. Holovis designed the show content and system integration, while Panasonic supplied the laser projectors that keep the imagery bright and evenly lit across the dome’s curved interior surface.
Laser Projection Built for Immersive Venues
Projecting onto a continuous dome surface, rather than a flat screen, demands precise edge-blending, consistent brightness across sharply angled surfaces and projectors reliable enough to run multiple shows a day throughout a multi-month season. Panasonic’s laser-phosphor projectors are built for exactly that kind of fixed-installation duty, with the long, maintenance-light operating life laser light sources are known for and the colour consistency needed to keep a blended, multi-projector image looking seamless to an audience standing inside it.
The approach echoes Panasonic’s other large-scale projection work, including a record-setting live video-mapping debut in Lille, though Panasonic Holovis Gunwharf Quays trades a single outdoor event for a fixed, repeatable indoor venue. Holovis handled the show control and content pipeline that ties the projection system to music, lighting and live performers inside the dome.
Why Gunwharf Quays
Gunwharf Quays, the waterfront retail and leisure destination in Portsmouth, gives the ApolloDomes format a high-footfall location to run both a Halloween and a Christmas show from the same structure within a single season. For Holovis and Panasonic, the installation is a visible case study in how dome-based projection can support a venue’s programming year-round rather than for a single event, with the underlying projection and show-control infrastructure carried over between productions while the content, set dressing and performers change. More detail on the show-control approach behind Panasonic Holovis Gunwharf Quays is available on Holovis’s own site.
Part of a Broader Immersive Push
The Gunwharf Quays dome adds to a growing list of immersive, projection-driven attractions built on Panasonic hardware, part of a wider trend of retail and leisure destinations using dome and tunnel-style installations to draw repeat visits across different seasons. For operators, the appeal is a single piece of infrastructure, the dome, the projectors and the show-control system, that can be reskinned for Halloween, Christmas or other seasonal content without a full technical rebuild each time.
Holovis has built similar dome and immersive-experience projects for attractions and brand activations elsewhere, and positions Panasonic Holovis Gunwharf Quays as a template it can adapt for other retail and leisure operators looking to add a projection-based draw to an existing site.
For Gunwharf Quays, the arrangement also means the dome earns its keep across most of the year rather than sitting idle between events: Pumpkinville carries the structure through the autumn half-term and Halloween period, and Christmasville takes over in time for the festive shopping season, with the same projection and show-control backbone running both.
That kind of seasonal turnaround, swapping content and dressing rather than rebuilding the venue, is increasingly what distinguishes a purpose-built immersive dome like Panasonic Holovis Gunwharf Quays from a one-off pop-up installation.
Pricing and availability
Pumpkinville is running now at Gunwharf Quays ahead of Halloween, with Christmasville set to take over the dome for the festive season. Ticketing and session times are managed directly through the Gunwharf Quays and Pumpkinville/Christmasville event pages; Panasonic and Holovis did not publish project costs for the installation.
Key specifications
- Venue: ApolloDomes geodesic dome, Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth
- Productions: Pumpkinville (Halloween) and Christmasville (Christmas), rotating seasonally in the same dome
- Projection: Panasonic laser-phosphor projectors, edge-blended for full 360-degree dome coverage
- Show design and system integration: Holovis
- Format: live immersive theatrical experience combining projection, lighting, music and performers
