FT Projection Maps Data Graphics In Grand Central
March 28, 2012 by Dave Haynes
The Financial Times international business newspaper is running a somewhat interactive Digital OOH campaign highlighted by a big projection thing in one of the cavernous halls of New York’s Grand Central Terminal.
The campaign is intended to put the spotlight on the paper’s efforts in data-driven journalism – which is a lot of what business coverage is about anyway.
It’s just a short-term thing at Grand Central that includes event marketing people (fancy term: brand ambassadors) getting people to interact with a series of 3D interactive info graphics projection-mapped on a 70 feet high on the hall’s south wall. They do that by moving around a huge touch-sensitive floor mat – which seems kinda goofy knowing what’s been done for many years with interactive floor projections.
They had the projectors. They had the rigging. Oh well …
That said, the hall makes for an awesome projection canvas.
The infographics touch on three central topics of the FT‘s coverage: the position of the U.S. relative to the global economy, the spread and growth of mobile technology, and the global recession and recovery, U.S. managing editor Rob Grimshaw said in an interview with Mashable. All three were designed by David McCandless, author of Information Is Beautiful (and this great TED Talk).
The online extension of the campaign resides at ftgraphicworld.com, where visitors can watch videos of the infographics in action and share their reactions through an embedded Facebook comment widget. Visitors can also take advantage of a free, one-week subscription offer from the FT.com.
As noted by Mashable and tweeted by LocaModa’s Stephen Randall, it’s too bad this project is all canned graphics and there is no live element or social element to any of this (at least not that I can tell beyond the website social links).
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