The light facade featured 100+ moving lights on the inside of a parking garage, composing a sort of low-resolution pixel display - with moving pixels.
Since this garage happened to be Frankfurt's first bicycles garage as well, we came up with a bicycle themed game and actual bicycles as game controllers.
Client
CA Immo
Contractor
MESO Digital Interiors GmbH
Year
2016
Role
Game design, simulation and design of the lights' movement, overall software development and setup on site
The light beams were placed on the inside of the parking garage, projecting onto a mesh surrounding the building on the outside.
The challenging part was to design an intelligent lighting system that would allow to display all possible constellations in the game at all times without dropping one of the game's elements when transitioning from one moving light to the other.
While a single light was projecting a dot, all the neighbouring lights that weren't projecting a dot of their own already, would anticipate a dot's trajectory when it would start to move in any direction. The lights would target a dot, eventually starting to "take over" it by blending in when the dot would get closer to another light - transitioning smoothly from one moving light to the other without projecting too much of an ellipsis.
Essentially this meant that all 100+ moving lights had to be calibrated on a common space and were almost always moving, even though only a few elements were on display at the same time.
The angular acceleration ramps of the lights were taken into account to get as close to reality as possible. The actual hardware in the parking garage could only be used for a couple hours two nights before the event took place, allowing very little space for error.