Forward Storefront

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Creating an Interactive Transparent LED Storefront

 

 

I helped create an interactive LED installation for Forward, an AI-based healthcare company.

See-Through LED Storefront

As a member of Anticlockwise Arts, I helped develop an interactive LED art installation using infrared camera tracking and a novel transparent LED display.

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Modern Storefront

Located in downtown San Francisco, we were hired to produce an interactive art installation that comes alive every night.

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Large-Format LED Wall

The display features LED pixels spaced far apart so that you can see inside the storefront as well as the displayed image.

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Body-Tracked Simulation

The installation uses IR cameras to track the movement of viewers walking by.

The Process

This project was tricky because we were using a new prototype transparent LED technology from China. At the time, we were one of three people in the USA to have it.

While we were designing the interaction simulation, a separate company was responsible for reverse-engineering the LED controller hardware and software.

As usual, we had a very short timeline and a high-profile launch.

The biggest challenge was that the LED driver company firmly wanted to deliver its driver for Linux. And, we had built our interaction using Windows.

To resolve this, I wrote a linux frame-capture application in C++ and OpenGL that ingested our windows-based fluid simulation frames and delivered them to the custom LED driver. Success!

This project taught me the value of modularizing art applications. If we didn’t break up the simulation from the display tech, we would have needed to port our code from Windows to an old version of Linux. By separating each team’s effort into small isolated modules, we were able to deliver on time with high quality.

Links

Keywords: Programming, Architecture, LED display, Interactive Art, San Francisco

Matt Sonic