Hypo Surface: Leonardo Would Have Loved This!
August 2006
Did you Know
That’s da Vinci, not DiCaprio, incidentally, and, as arguably the greatest genius in human history, he would have a blast with this new medium were he around today, 500 years later. You see, HypoSurface is the world’s very first digital architecture. You are allowed a pause of 15 seconds here to absorb this concept.
Get to know it, though, because you’re going to see more and more of it in the very near future at major exhibitions and trade shows—that’s if event marketer Charles W. Allen has his way. Allen and his firm, the C.W. Allen Group (cwallengroup.com) have secured the exclusive marketing rights to HypoSurface, representing the inventors from MIT Labs (yes, that MIT).
Allen knows his way around the exhibition industry; he’s been a fixture in it for nearly two decades. He understands firsthand the endless struggle to get someone’s attention these days. “There’s an overload, a deluge of over 5,000 promotional messages a day coming at people,” he says, “resulting in the most time-impoverished and attention-span battered period in humanity. Nowhere is there more bombarding than at a major exposition or a major entertainment venue.” And that’s without SPAM.
With HypoSurface, Allen’s about to up the ante. Very simply put, it will come at you from the ceilings, will surround you on the walls, and you’ll be walking across it. “Its configurations are virtually limitless,” asserts Allen, and all the while, it’s interacting with you. (Want another pause to reboot?)
Let us help: Close your eyes and imagine you’re in front of a booth at McCormick Center. You’re looking at a gigantic and strikingly faithful rendition of a very famous soda bottle, and it appears to spin. While spinning, it’s changing in appearance to solid liquid (not an oxymoron, we swear), still retaining the same bottle shape. Suddenly, it becomes bright with a dazzling light show, still looking liquid. As it rotates, it morphs into another brand and then another and yet another (all in the company’s stable), until it finally returns to the original classic.
At the same time, it’s interacting with all who come remotely near it—to the sight of them, their motions,
to sounds.
Touch it and you’ll see ripples going outward from your touch—like ripples from the stone thrown in a pond—at a rate of 60 miles per hour. “You can literally feel the force of wind that it’s giving off,” enthuses Allen. As someone walks by a HypoSurface wall, the indentation of their body shape moves along the surface, mirror-like but three dimensionally, giving a whole new meaning to the concept of body image.
“It’s all about captivating the audience long enough to delay the flight-or-fight response that so many people have. People are enjoying the presentation,” explains Allen. And, while they’re enjoying that novel presentation, they’re also absorbing the brand message in a very positive fashion. It’s called experiential marketing, which is according to Allen, all about “bringing brands to life and, to the contrary, bringing life to brands. HypoSurface represents the front end of the new experiential marketing wave at live events.”
It’s time to examine the spaceship.
What is it, physically? “It’s thousands of actuators behind a special fabricated skin that are digitally attached to the back of this skin,” explains Allen. “There are sensors involved with the software that help drive this hardware, and these sensors are what allow this technology to be interactive to sight, sound, touch, feel and movement.”
Right now, the system uses start-of-the-art front projection and an array of colors to mimic brand colors and design, as true to the official brand as possible. It’s also been tried with no projection, and due to the reflection of the plates on HypoSurface’s skin, it picks up the color of the clothing, and the glints of the sunlight, to create a brilliant lightshow even without frontal projection. Like all technology, there are subtle changes in mind for future versions. Certainly one of the coming iterations is capacity for rear projection in addition to the current frontal projection. There will also be a new reflective skin that manages to be rubbery for greater interactivity to touch.
Just to get your juices going, possible uses include a grabber at the front entrance of an event, a backdrop that is reactive to official awards presentations at opening and closing galas, a dance floor where everyone sees themselves while dancing—and the floor pulsates and ripples and projects images.
Up until now, HypoSurface has mostly been viewed abroad: in Italy at the Venice Biennale International Pavilion; at CeBIT Technology Fair in Hanover, Germany; and most recently at the Barbican Exhibition London this June, among others. However, the North American unveiling will take place next month at the front entrance of the International Manufacturing Technology Show at Chicago’s McCormick Place. Oxnard, California-based Haas Automation—the largest machine tool builder in North America—is the proud sponsor at the show of what they have dubbed this “triumph of technology.”
We call it very cool.
