Comcast Video Wall Transfixes Philly

High-Resolution LED Display Draws Crowds to Operator’s New Headquarters

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 7/5/2008 6:39:00 AM

The starring attraction of the 58-story Comcast Center in downtown Philadelphia is a trompe l’oeil drawing crowds of admirers in the City of Brotherly Love.

Consuming the width of the lobby is an 83-by-25-foot, 10-million-pixel high-definition video wall that displays a loop of different images and scenes. Take a look at our photo gallery here.

At one point, people appear to be dancing on the wall just above the entryways to the elevator banks – the first time visitors see it, they often do a double take. Another sequence shows dancers twirling on silver hoops hanging from the ceiling.

Other scenes include sharks and fish swimming in an azure sea; a Phillies slugger swinging at a fastball; cogs of a clock meshing together; and images of outer space.

Since the building’s June 6 official opening, passersby have congregated in the lobby to stare at the undulating images. The video wall has instantly become a tourist attraction, according to a June 27 Philadelphia Inquirer article.

The LED screen modules and processors were manufactured by Belgian imaging equipment maker Barco, according to Comcast, it’s the largest 4-millimeter LED screen in the world, providing five times the resolution of HDTV and 30% greater resolution than IMAX screens.

The wall comprises 6,771 individual Barco NX-4 LED modules, each of which is able to reproduce 281 trillion colors.

Comcast commissioned producer David Niles to create the “artistic, non-commercial audio/video experience,” which includes “hundreds of virtual worlds.”

A 9-minute, 41-second video of the wall in action is available on YouTube