Fresh from kitting out a building with motion-sensing digital walls, experiential design firm ESI Design has unveiled a towering digital installation at the Wells Fargo Building in the US city of Denver that's made up of five 86-ft (26 m) tall, high-res LED displays.
The eight-story high installation is the latest in a series designs that ESI has created for Beacon Capital Partners, which owns the Wells Fargo Center. In this instance, though, the building's huge glass atrium gave ESI the opportunity to create something truly unique. A team of designers and animators developed both the concept and content to exploit the scale of the space.
Senior immersive designer at ESI Ed Purver says the aim was to strike a balance between the tranquility and grandeur in the content, as well as between the use of the digital media and the existing architecture.
"The space demanded a design that was epic in scale, but we didn't want an enormous rectangular screen that would have felt like typical digital signage," says Purver in a press release. "So we split the screen into five separate columns of LED to accentuate the impressive verticality of the atrium. Viewed together, they create one canvas."
The screens display content inspired by Denver's surroundings, with imagery of the regional landscape that "captures the fluid movement patterns of nature."
Among the different content-sets that have been designed for the installation is a 3,600-strong animated flock of of birds, the behavior of which is governed by an algorithm and never repeats. Meanwhile, visions of Colorado mountainscapes comprised of Instagram photo mosaics are intended to give the impression of looking at the landscape "through slats in an enormous fence."
Another piece shows floor-to-ceiling waterfalls flowing with varying speeds and volumes. The waterfalls take different paths across the installation depending on the direction of the wind outside. There's also a grove of trees that change with the time of day and season, slow-motion drops of ink swirling in water, and a mountain vista with a five-day weather forecast.
The three-year project saw the LED columns installed and tested in June, with the final content completed ahead of the public opening this month.
Source: ESI Design