This was an interactive building using the largest 3D LED matrix in the world, wrapped around and running through the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010. It included an interactive queue area under the raised building and an interactive 360 degree cinema with a 3D LED matrix ceiling that also controlled the building facade. Developed for Spinifex with partner ESI for the Shanghai Expo 2010.

Due to the new nature of this canvas this required a lot of bespoke development. Firstly I had to come up with a layering and syncing system to play across a 3D LED matrix. This had to be able to take a 2D movie file as input as the content was to be partly interactive and partly developed my the Spinifex motion graphics team. Once this was established a series of Java applications were built to re-render the motion graphics files into a format ready for the matrix. A realtime 3D visualisation application was built to preview these in realtime, positioned amongst 3D models of the actual environment. This was developed in C++ using OpenFrameworks.

The cinema included optical flow based tracking of the 500 strong crowd’s arm movements using 12 infrared cameras. This application was developed by The Product based on my specifications. The cinema also monitored people clapping through an application built by Ardrian Hardjono. All of these inputs fed into a custom message server built in C++, which also took cues from the show control system put in place by PRG, which toggled between the interactive and linear states. This messaging server then synchronised a dozen machines including the machines used for tracking and those used to render interactive graphics across the cinema ceiling and facade, as well as the queue area.