If you watched the Super Bowl last night, you already know what happened during halftime. If you didn’t, the easiest way to describe it is to say the entire stadium essentially turned into a massive human video screen. Using infrared technology and embedded LEDs, every person in the audience became a single pixel in a stadium-sized screen that shimmered and blinked behind Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was a fantastic, if subtle, effect that prompted a little head-scratching. I mean, how the hell do you turn 80,000 rowdy football fans into a complex, human art installation?
2 comments:
I have to say that this is extremely interesting. I'm very curious as to what the "transmitters" were like. I'd imagine just a large projector type deal where instead of visible RGB colors, a signal of infrared was sent out. I also have to imagine that the coding for everything and all the programming and engineering that went into this was extremely intensive. I find it hard to believe that the small company did all the work. I like to think that once the super bowl backed it up, then the project was partially passed along to another, more developed company.
It's hard to even begin to imagine how much work and planning must have had to go into this. It seems like there are just so many variables that could have gone awry, especially if you take into account the sheer scale that the event was taking place on. It must have been difficult to test out the transmitting and receiving and so forth beforehand over the distances that would have been in place during the actual performance.
I do wonder how much it cost to put together the whole show, including the cost of all the LEDs and putting them into the caps. I'd also be curious to know how long it took to achieve the effect, and if it all went smoothly in the end or not.
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