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. To check out some of the eye-popping images, take a look at this online photo gallery.
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 Inquirerarticle.
The LED screen modules and processors were manufactured by Barco, a Belgian imaging equipment maker.
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 is composed of 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.
