Friday

Gadget

No, This Dancing Building’s Bricks Are Not Falling Like Tetris [Art]

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This isn’t an animation, and its not CGI and its not a building doing the humpty dance. It’s really the ancient mint building in downtown SF life painted by 7 impeccably mapped HD projectors.

Obscura Digital, the company behind the set alight show at Youtube’s Symphony last week, has has used their aptness software to control a giant HD set alight show spread across multiple, corresponding 20k resolution projectors for a Mcafee ad. Never mind the marketing purpose, this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I reckon of it as using 3d graphics gear to make the real world look like video games, instead of using 3d graphics gear to make games look like real life.

To get the image to look seamless, the software calculates distance and angle and surface shape of the building, compensating brightness, picture shift, and other variables. This sort of thing would naturally take months to plot, but they set up this example in a matter of days, because their gear controllers are very flexible. Here are examples of their other work, including the iGoogle launch in NYC, which used nearly 20 projectors, and the youtube symphony. [Obscura via Quick Company]