The continuing story of our recent art installation project. Today - it’s time to delve into the technical side of the project…

With the physical installation and design/animation direction agreed, the next stage was to research and implement a delivery system that would fulfil the following requirements:

- To display the animations on a 4m x 1m surface in as high a resolution as possible. The most likely configuration would be three 1024 by 768 ’screens’, displayed edge to edge. (Luckily this gives a resolution of 3072 x 768, which is exactly 4:1)

- To be able to display multiple content types, such as QuickTime movies, images, openGL containers and Quartz Compositions

- To generate the animations in such a way that the key assets and text within them were created at run time, and hence would be easy to edit

- To run from one computer, to simplify installation and maintenance

- To provide edge blending and other alignment tools to reduce the need for physical projector alignment

The very high graphical requirements ruled out any off-the-shelf software. Instead, we decided to build our own display engine, written in Cocoa, which could then utilise both OpenGL and Apple’s Quartz Composer

Although the Eye display would be comprised of three ’screens’, we decided to show the animations using four projectors, with a great deal of overlap between them. The alternative was to butt the three screens together with no gap between them - something which would be very difficult (if not impossible).

Using overlaps created a new problem: the areas of overlap were much brighter than the rest of the display.

The engine displaying a simple alignment grid.

To counter this, the Engine needed built in edge-blending:

Test pattern with no edge blending - note the blue area on the right hand side.

Test pattern with edge blending.

In addition to edge blending, we also added a variety of other tools to the Engine, including: x and y position editor, colour balance editor and the ability to rotate each ’screen’ on its x, y or z axis.

Our early tests with the Engine used trailers for Ratatouille and - heaven forbid - Fantastic Four, so it was a delight when we were finally able to show prototype animations at full size:

A demo animation projected onto the wall. Note that the screens are not perfectly aligned; some blurring is visible on the latin body text.

After experimenting with different media types, we discovered the optimum set was as follows:

- QuickTime, for full screen animation elements

- Quartz Composer, for individual animated objects built around live images and movies

- OpenGL, for animated on-screen text

Animation elements were controlled and synchronised via a markup language developed especially for the Eye. We used an existing Cogapp technology, CEF, to author and edit the xml files, and then developed a schedule function so it could show any story or combination of stories at any time.

The innovation theme explodes into life, a combination of QuickTime, Quartz Composer and OpenGL.

In the next blog: finalising the animations, late night installation, robots and remote desktop…

The continuing story of our recent art installation project…

During the original proposal phase, we investigated how we might project animations onto a sheet of clear glass. Obviously this is not normally possible (try it - you get a faintly ghosted image and… er… thats it). However, we had previously discovered a product called HoloPro which seemed to fit our requirements: it is virtually transparent, so when placed on glass provides a near-invisible projection surface. In addition, it doesn’t display black, so if you project a white animation moving over a black background, what you see on the glass is the animation apparently moving in mid air. Nifty!

Ben Aquilina stood behind some sample HoloPro glass.

With the project secured, we began negotiations with the HoloPro supplier, Pro Nova and their UK representatives, Amvida. Our requirement was a single sheet of HoloPro film, which would be sandwiched between between two sheets of glass, each 4 metres wide by 1 metre high. At the time Pro Nova had not produced a single sheet anything like that size, so our initial plan was to create three sheets and have them butted together inside the glass.

To help with our investigation, Amvida kindly lent us a small sheet of HoloPro glass for the duration of the project.

The tech department install the test sheet of HoloPro.

A close up of the HoloPro film, showing the individual ‘cells’.

Joe stood behind the glass, running a demo animation. Simple lines and objects seem to work best on HoloPro.

The nature of HoloPro began to determine how the final animations would look. Clean simple lines and strong areas of colour gave the most impressive results. One of our earlier ideas was to have a sense that images and text were ‘growing’ onto the screen - HoloPro seemed to work brilliantly with this style of animation.

After a series of workshops with Prudential to determine the basic approach to the animations, we determined they would:

be slow and elegant
would build up over time
would be mainly black and white but incorporate key brand colours as highlights
would be ‘organic’ in nature i.e. waterfalls, globes, trees etc.

This gave us a good brief to begin development of the graphic and animation style. It now fell to our tech dept to build a software solution that would deliver these massive scale animations…

In the next blog: our technical solution, delivering ultra-wide screen projections (on the office’s back wall)

This time last year Cogapp embarked on one of its most extraordinary projects. A project which would involve: creating and installing the world’s largest single piece of ‘HoloPro’ film, embedded in a four metre sheet of glass; writing custom software to display, synchronise and merge high definition content over four ‘hidden’ projectors; and ultimately the creation of a unique and breathtaking piece of multimedia art. This would come to be known as the Prudential Eye.

The Prudential Group has a long history of sourcing and displaying beautiful art around its buildings. In 2006 they approached Cogapp to create brand new kind of art installation - one which would be challenging and thought-provoking, engaging but not distracting, and one which used state-of-the-art technology to tell a range of stories about the Group. This installation would be both art piece and storyteller.

Our solution was a sheet of glass, four metres by one, suspended in space, beautiful and ethereal, a real talking point - even when switched off!

Below: Early concept illustrations as presented to the project board.

Animations, text and images would dance across the glass, examining the past, present and future of the Prudential Group. A thoughtful mix of art and storytelling - using technology which did not yet exist, and on hardware that had never been built to this scale. The challenge was clear!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be putting up more ‘making of…’ posts about the Eye, taking you from the concepts above, all the way through to the robot assisted installation. To end part one of this story, here are some early mockups of the concept and a 3D walkthrough of what we planned to create…

Concept renders created by Cogapp’s Design Director Colin Jenkinson.