Our Megafaces project takes home a gold cube at the ADC 94th Annual Awards in Miami. If you haven’t seen the Megafaces facade in action, there’s a nice little intro video for the project on the awards page here.
May 262015
Nov 142014
I am excited to announce that our Megafaces facade for the Sochi Winter Olympics has won a Red Dot Design award 2014.
“MegaFaces is a cross-platform project conceived and built for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. Formed by 11,000 telescopic actuators the kinetic facade is able to transform in three dimensions to recreate visitors’ faces at monumental scale. The aim was to create a monument to celebrate people. Facial impressions are relayed to the facade from 3D scans made in proprietary 3D photo booths within the building. An algorithm transforms the faces on-the-fly considering day lighting, scale, rotation and colour. The resultant portraits appear three at a time, at eight meters tall.”
Congratulations to everyone involved!
Jun 232014
Our Megafaces Pavilion for the Sochi Olympics won the 2014 Cannes Lion Grand Prix for Innovation. Created by architecture studio Asif Kahn Ltd, engineered by iArt and with art direction and graphics tech by yours truly, the project was a monumental collaboration that tied together amazing creativity and a mountain of technology to create a compelling visual experience for visitors to the Olympic park.
Find the official Cannes submission video HERE.
Celebrating the Grand Prix in the green room
Jun 222014
click for larger
I am just back from the Sochi Olympics where I was working with the amazing teams from Asif Kahn and iArt on the “Megafaces Facade” for the Megafon pavilion. Over the past six months I have been providing creative direction for this crazy project:
I was asked to come on-board to provide expertise in computer graphics, lighting, faces, and overall aesthetics to the piece. The challenge from a visual design perspective was to take raw, 3d scan data from the ‘photobooths’ in the pavilion and then develop an automated solution, which we called the Creative Processing Pipeline (CPP), for coloring, relighting, composing and outputting the faces to the facade in way that, well, looks cool. It is a bit like composing a drawing or photograph, but algorithmically so that it always (ermm, almost always) produces a compelling visual result.
Checking the output before the opening ceremony