Screen Innovations introduced the KAOS 360 Rear-Pro Projection Screen on August 5, a motorized outdoor screen that shows a usable picture on both of its faces at the same time and scales up to 24 feet wide. The Austin company has not published pricing, and the first public showing is booked for CEDIA Expo 2026 in Denver, September 1 through 4.
The screen welds together two products SI already sells on their own. One is the 360 optic, a rear-projection material seeded with light-diffusing particles that scatter light in every direction instead of returning it toward one seating position. SI first shipped that material on the Solo 3. The other is KAOS, the company’s high-wind outdoor hardware platform, which uses what SI calls the Onyx Retention System to hold the fabric under tension inside its frame.
The combination is what SI is selling here. The company says the retention system keeps the surface flat enough to survive up to three times more air movement than a conventional outdoor projection screen, and that 24 feet is wider than any other motorized outdoor rear-projection system on the market. The 360 material spreads light across a 160-degree viewing cone on each side, which SI describes as bright and free of hot spots from either direction.
Front projection outdoors is forgiving. A little ripple in the fabric shifts the image slightly and most viewers never notice. Rear projection is not forgiving at all. The light passes through the material, so any bow or flutter changes the distance between the lens and the surface across the picture, and focus falls apart in the section that moved. A screen that looks fine hanging still can turn into a soft, wobbling mess the moment a breeze crosses the yard.
That is the problem Ryan Gustafson, SI’s founder and CEO, described when the company put its 360 material outdoors years ago. “Our dealers loved it but there was one major problem, even a stiff breeze would move the screen so much you had distortion and loss of image focus,” he said in the announcement. The KAOS frame is the answer SI landed on after that.
Tension is also why the 24-foot number matters more than it looks. Holding a fabric flat gets harder as it gets bigger, because the same wind load acts on more area and the span between anchor points grows. SI extended the KAOS platform’s ceiling to 24 feet on its outdoor shade line before bringing rear projection into it, so the frame work came first and the optic followed.
The practical argument for a dual-sided screen is arithmetic. A backyard with a pool on one side and a patio on the other traditionally needed two screens and two projectors, or it needed the designer to pick a winner and seat everyone facing the same direction. A screen that reads correctly from both faces collapses that into one projector, one screen, and seating wherever the landscaping already put it.
Because the material diffuses rather than reflects, SI says installers can also use lens shift and keystone correction to place the projector off-axis without wrecking the image, which matters when the only spot to mount hardware is a soffit that happens to sit ten feet off center. The screen retracts into either a surface-mounted box or a recessed pocket cassette, both offered in several finishes, and it talks to the rest of the SI ecosystem of screens, shades and control systems.
Nothing about KAOS 360 is aimed at somebody shopping for a Saturday night movie in the driveway. It is a custom-install product, sold through dealers, engineered around problems that only appear when a screen lives outside permanently and has to survive weather without being taken down. The absence of a published price is itself a signal: products that quote a number on a spec sheet are products you buy, and products that do not are products someone quotes you after a site visit.
The consumer end of outdoor projection is moving in the opposite direction at the same time. Portable models with batteries and built-in streaming now handle the pop-up movie night for a couple hundred dollars, and the interesting fight down there is over brightness claims rather than wind loads. The two markets barely touch. If you are shopping the other end, our picks for outdoor projectors in 2026 cover what the portable side looks like right now.
What KAOS 360 does tell you about the high end is where the money is going. Fixed outdoor cinema has been one of the few reliably growing corners of custom installation, and the hardware race there is not about resolution anymore. It is about whether a screen can stay flat, stay outside, and stay working through a season of weather. SI is betting the retention frame is the part dealers will pay for.
Two figures in the announcement are worth holding lightly until somebody measures them. “Up to three times greater air movement capability” is a comparison without a stated baseline, and SI has not published a wind speed rating for the rear-projection configuration the way outdoor shade products usually carry one. Gain and half-gain angle for the 360 material in this frame are also absent, which makes the 160-degree cone hard to translate into how much brightness a viewer actually loses walking from the center of the patio to the far chair.
That gap between a manufacturer’s phrasing and a measured result is a recurring theme in this category — we recently covered an Epson ultra short throw that measured above its own brightness rating, which cuts the other way but makes the same point about taking spec sheets on faith. CEDIA in September is the first chance to stand in front of KAOS 360 and see how much of the claim survives contact with a real patio and a real breeze. Details are on Screen Innovations’ site, and the demo runs the length of the show.