Custom Digital Art Floods LED-filled Barcelona Mall To Drive Experience

September 19, 2018 by Dave Haynes

I’ve consulted with shopping mall groups, and they often talk about their aspiration to use digital to create memorable experiences.

A lot of what I have seen done in malls is not all that memorable, and ultimately driven more by getting incremental ad dollars from big screens on walls. But sometimes you bump into projects where the property people really understood experience, and the investment they needed to make to realize that.

This is just flat beautiful – custom digital art that floods the floor and bulkhead walls of the Las Arenas shopping center in central Barcelona. It’s a building that got its start with brutality – it was a bullring – but now houses high-end shops.

The big European AV integrator TRISON worked with Merlin Properties to put direct view LED on the walls and, most notably, in the floor of the shopping center. A 64-square-metre circular screen is complemented with another 62-meter long perimeter screen suspended in the perimeter of the bullring terrace.

All the content is synced, and the floor LED is interactive, presumably using overhead camera sensors. There are seven LED screens around the mall.

That content was all developed by the Paris agency ADMEMORI. The company says the mosaic artwork, with seems to play a lot with the ideas of circles and rings (given the building’s heritage), has a couple of influences:

The artwork created by ADMEMORI is a tribute to the work of mosaic, a decorative art very long used during antiquity. Renewed in a more architectural principle by the famous architect Antoni Gaudi who transformed the face of Barcelona, ??this art inspired the creation for Las Arenas. Two worlds have been created as moving circular mosaics. The first was created to remind the proximity of Barcelona with the Mediterranean and give the impression that the mosaic is aquatic. The second is much more solar, embodying Spain with a dominant red color ornamented by golden touches that appeal to the heat and sun of the peninsula!

The goal has been to set up the central square of the visit route. The digital installation invites visitors to “play” with the desired content to create confusion between contemplation and interactivity.

I like that the interactive is about the art. Floor-based interactive has been around for many years, using overhead projectors and cameras. But I think this is far more compelling to all ages than the sort of game-based stuff I’ve seen that only seems to attract little kids.

Award-winner, I think, if the proponents enter contests.

1. Lilian Rabin says:

   September 19, 2018 at 9:17 am

   Thanks a lot Dave for sharing the news and your positive feedback !

   Reply