AUSTIN, TEXAS
In Room 104 of Infinity Ward’s Austin studio, the Play/Test room, rows of gaming stations run end to end, with testers side by side in headsets and game audio and conversation all around them. This is where the studio behind Call of Duty plays its own games before anyone else does, hunting down every bug and rough edge, and a room built for that much noise needs a ceiling that can take it. The design team’s answer was a folded field of felt that rises and falls like terrain down the length of the space, a ceiling that would absorb the sound and give the room a shape worth looking up at. They drew it around another manufacturer’s product. The ceiling hanging there today is ours, and getting it there meant delivering their design fold for fold.
Few studios have a bigger audience to answer to. Infinity Ward created Call of Duty, one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time, and its Austin studio needed a room where its quality assurance team could put that work through its paces. The room is long rows of stations where testers sit together for hours, each with a monitor, a controller and a headset.
The design team had already pictured the ceiling: a peaks-and-valleys felt surface over a field roughly 12 by 30 feet, drawn on the plans as CL2A and CL2B. The request that came to us was simple to say and harder to do. Match that geometry with our baffles, quiet the room, and meet the ceiling construction around it, all on the studio’s schedule.
The idea was a ceiling with folds in it, more like a landscape overhead than a row of blades. Our job was to build those folds out of flat felt.
The secret is in the bottom edge. Each blade is cut with a zig-zag along its underside, and we drew eight versions of it, lettered A through H. Profile A swings hard, from 4 inches deep at its high points to the full 11⅞ inches at its low points. Each letter after it flattens the swing a little, until E runs almost straight. Then the peaks and valleys flip and deepen again toward H. Hung 4 inches on center in a mirrored sequence, A to H and back to A, the low points line up into valleys and the high points into ridges. The creases cross in a repeating diamond rhythm, and 91 blades stop reading as blades and start reading as one folded surface.
The whole field is one colorway, SND102 Morning Fog, a heathered grey. The architect marked it on our product data in June, and we confirmed it again on the shop drawings before anything was cut. Even the hardware stays in character. The blades hang from rails clad in the same Soundcore felt, carried on galvanized aircraft cable with adjustable grippers, so the hardware reads as part of the felt. Every blade was held to ±1/16 inch, and nothing went to production until the drawings came back signed.
The room is dark by design: charcoal walls, grey carpet, a red-lit map of Austin glowing on the far wall. Against all of that, the felt is the brightest mass in the room. Downlights and linear light strips sit in the gaps between the rails, so the blades catch light along their edges and the folds read even in a room lit for screens.
Look up from any station and the creases run the same way you’re facing: down the rows, toward the map. That’s where the ceiling does more than absorb sound. Its stacked, contour-like edges read like terrain overhead, in a studio whose walls are full of maps, and in this room, beneath a city map lit in red. The acoustic surface becomes the room’s defining feature and a piece of the studio’s visual world.
A ceiling designed around someone else's product. The peaks-and-valleys ceiling had been drawn for a different manufacturer's system. Our baffles weren't on the plans, and a substitution only works if the designers believe it won't cost them their idea. So we put the real thing in their hands: product literature, then physical samples of the felt. The design team moved to add our product to the project by addendum, then approved our product data and the Morning Fog sample. From that point, the job was to deliver their design with our system, not swap in something that only looked close.
Folding a ceiling out of flat blades. A felt baffle is a flat piece of material, and the design called for a faceted, three-dimensional surface. Instead of bending or stacking anything, we let the cut do the work: eight profiles, sequenced so the folds travel across the field. Then there was length. The field is 12 feet wide, and a single baffle tops out at 108 inches. Rather than break the ceiling into two visible runs, we built each blade from a 108-inch and a 36-inch piece locked together with a dovetail connection, placed at one of the points where the profiles cross. The result is 91 continuous 12-foot blades, every one worked out on paper before a single piece was cut.
Keeping the hardware out of sight. The field sits inside the room's black gypsum ceiling, with a bulkhead along its edge. Our drawings held the top band of each blade, and the rails that carry it, just above the bulkhead line, so only the sculpted edges hang into view. The architect marked that line on our shop drawings, noted the field at 12 feet by 30 feet 5 inches, and returned the package approved as noted the very next day. Field verification and installation stayed clearly with the installer, so the order could be released without anything left in question.
Everything the installer needed was on paper before the felt left our shop. The reflected ceiling plan laid out where each of the eight profiles hung in the mirrored A-to-H sequence, 4 inches on center across the field, and every 12-foot blade came as a 108-inch and a 36-inch piece joined by its dovetail connection.
The blades hang from expandable rails clad in the same Morning Fog felt, and each rail is carried on galvanized aircraft cable with an adjustable gripper, so the height of every run could be set on site. The rails sit just above the bulkhead line, which keeps the hardware out of view from the floor. Field verification and installation were handled by the installer, working from our approved drawings, and by late summer 2023 all 91 blades were in place over the room.
By late summer, the folds were real. The shop drawings had come back signed the day after they went out, production was accelerated to meet the build, and the 91 blades now hang in the Play/Test room: eight profiles in sequence, each 12-foot blade continuous, the rails tucked above the bulkhead line. The ceiling the design team had pictured for another manufacturer's system now hangs in ours, fold for fold.
That is what makes this project worth telling. A substitution usually means giving something up: a little geometry, a little finish, a little of the original idea. Here, the idea came through intact. The design kept its peaks and valleys. The room got a ceiling built to soak up its noise. And the testers who spend their days in Room 104 work under a ceiling that reads like terrain, rolling over the rows toward a map of the city glowing red. For designers, it makes a simple case. The product named on the drawings matters less than whether the team building it understands what the drawing is trying to do.
Explore Soundcore® acoustic baffles or request samples at csicreative.com.
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