Five productions on the Outernet London canvas, all rendered live in Ventuz
The Now Building has run on Ventuz every day since it opened. This is what the canvas is doing now.
Four storeys high, floor to ceiling, 360 degrees: the Outernet London canvas is 16K across and 150 million pixels in total, and it faces one of the busiest corners of the city. Our first story about Outernet covered the launch. This one is about what has happened since, because the canvas has not been showing the same film on a loop. It has hosted a composed sound-and-light installation, an airline campaign built from particles, an artwork for Pride Month, a football game played with phones and a Samsung Galaxy launch.
Every one of them was computed live, frame by frame, on the same Ventuz installation. No render farm, no overnight bakes, no pre-rendered frames. When the content changed, the building followed.
Credits
Creative direction, music and sound design: Kevin Pollard. Visuals: Savva Mihaescu, Graphical Nature. Outernet creative team: Alex Payne, Jad Zouein, Andrés Pachón, Oliver Schilke. Audio: Jamie Brewer, Delta Live / Groupe Novelty.
Acoustic Fields: sound and image from one score
Five surrounding screens, four storeys high, 150 million pixels, one real-time pipeline. Creative director Kevin Pollard composed Acoustic Fields so that sound and image share a single compositional process: L-Acoustics L-ISA wraps the audio around the same geometry the visuals inhabit, and the audience does not watch the work, it moves through it.
Savva Mihaescu of Graphical Nature built the entire visual system in Ventuz, driving the five screens through a 64K video processor chain in real time. At this scale the software has to disappear, and it did.
A Cathay Pacific flight, boarding four storeys above Tottenham Court Road
For the Cathay Pacific campaign the wrap-around screens became a night flight: city lights drifting below, clouds rolling past, an aircraft banking overhead, flight CX548 on the board. The audience stood inside the flight path.
The technical challenge was the resolution itself. At 150 million pixels, texture maps stop being an option: they eat memory, choke streaming and still go soft at four storeys tall. So Savva Mihaescu built the scene from particles instead. City lights, clouds, aircraft trails, even the stars are GPU-driven particle systems standing in for massive textures. Four particle systems, zero pre-rendered frames: what reaches the screen is the scene itself, computed fresh every frame at full resolution.
In the room
The audience under the wrap-around screens while the aircraft banks overhead, filmed during the campaign.
Pride Sequins: a wall that shimmers, breathes and reacts
Every June the Outernet screens come alive with Pride Sequins, an artwork by Savva Mihaescu. Every sequin is a live particle, not a baked animation. Two further particle systems, rendered to textures, drive the colour and the slow breathing of the wall.
The piece started as a linear video for the Arcade tunnel and grew into fully real-time versions for The Now Building and Trending. The latest edition added a camera layer: the sequins react to the people standing in front of them. Move, and the light moves with you.
Goal Rush: your phone is the controller
With Skechers, Outernet turned The Now Building into a football pitch. Goal Rush is a free game: no app, no download, no controller. A visitor's phone talks live to the 360-degree canvas, everyone in the room plays at once, and every move lights up the screens the instant it happens. Outernet describes it as a world first.
For Ventuz it is a straightforward job: live input from dozens of phones, bound to the scene and rendered in real time across the full canvas, with a leaderboard that updates as the goals go in.
Samsung Galaxy: a launch inside a kaleidoscope
For the Samsung Galaxy campaign the canvas became a world of shattered glass and light. The new Galaxy foldable and the Galaxy Watch tumble through crystal shards that mirror across all four walls and the ceiling, so the audience on the beanbags below sits inside the reflection.
On the canvas
The finished piece, running live across all four walls and the ceiling of The Now Building.
From a laptop to a four-storey building
Savva Mihaescu built the piece in Ventuz from the first blockout to the final output: the phone model on a laptop screen, the node graph next to it, and the same scene running at full resolution on the building. No render farm in between. Change the scene, and the building follows.
Behind the scenes
Savva at work on the Samsung scene: the device models, the Ventuz node graph and the first test renders.
One installation, five productions, no second system
A composed installation, two brand campaigns, an artwork and a game have nothing in common except the building they ran in and the engine that drew them. That is the point of a real-time canvas: the hardware stays, the content changes with every brief, and a change in the scene is a change on the building. Outernet has been running this way every day since it opened, and the next production is already in the pipeline.
Explore more projects on the website of Outernet.
