Sculpting With LCD Pixels

Each one of the small squares in this sculpture is actually an LCD cell, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. What you see here is just a small portion of the sculpture that spans multiple floors of the atrium at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. It’s made up of multiple panels hosting a total of 3600 LCD cells. We first saw it way back in April, but now there is a ‘making of’ video which you can see embedded after the break.

The project took about 18 months to complete, starting with a 256 pixel prototype. That served as proof that the non-lit hardware would achieve the look they were going for. From there they designed the code which would generate patterns on the sculpture and used it to drive a digital model (we’d bet that was to get the go-ahead and funding). The fast-motion footage of the three-man assembly line formed when soldering up the circuits is fun to watch, the real nail-biting stuff comes when they start mounting the fragile panels in the space.

[Thanks Stig]

15 thoughts on “Sculpting With LCD Pixels

  1. A larger, curvy version of the LCD window walls at the original Star Tours rides at Disney parks, back in 1987.

    I went to Disneyland in Anaheim that year. Looooooooooooooooong line for Star Tours and everything else.

    The “big concept” of using a motion simulator for a ride was it would be easy and inexpensive to change the ride by changing the video and motion programming.

    Twenty Three Years later, *nothing* changed. Same ride it was in 1987. Disney has recently begun overhauling Star Tours at Star Tours: The Adventures Continue. The rides are getting a major hardware upgrade to six axis motion platforms.

    Hopefully it won’t take another 23 years for Disney to actually do what they said could be done with the original.

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