Vancouver Moose Knuckles Flagship Gets First Canadian Transparent LED Window

February 11, 2021 by Dave Haynes

The flagship location of the Canadian outerwear brand Moose Knuckles – a shop in Pacific Centre mall in downtown Vancouver – has what is touted as the first use in Canada of LG’s 14mm transparent LED film.

The film has been applied to the storefront glass in the mall, facing out to passing shoppers. A 98” portrait 4K flat panel sits in the opposite window, and content is synchronized across the two screens to create an extended canvas.

The experience, says Montreal-based solutions provider iGotcha Media, “stops mall visitors in their tracks as they pass the store. It attracts consumers into the store and helps Moose Knuckles engage them with branded content, lifestyle video, and rich motion graphics animation.”

“It was vital to provide complete visibility into the store and not obstruct line of sight with hard technology,” says Marcos Terenzio, VP Creative & Strategy for iGotcha. “Based on this brief we began exploring many different transparent display technology options before landing on this new 14mm Transparent LED Film technology from LG.”

“We created custom content that would maximize the transparent properties of the LED film and really tried to play with transitions between transparent to vibrant rich content. This created a very elegant, almost holographic, quality that customers and our client love.”

I like the concept of using transparent film on windows instead of the mesh-based solutions that look good from one side, but not so much from the non-illuminated side. That said, 14mm is still a pretty coarse pixel pitch for something that will be seen at relatively close quarters.

The general rule of thumb is that a 1mm pitch LED is best viewed from 10 feet back, a 5mm from 50 feet, and so on. So in theory, this would look great from 140 feet back, or let’s say 85, because some “rules of thumb” put the viewing distance ratio at 1mm = 6 feet.

A typical mall concourse is nowhere near 85 feet wide, and from what I recall of Pacific Centre, those concourses are not very wide. This video is helpful in showing what it looks like from maybe 20-30 feet away. It’s good-ish, but not great. But the bright, shifting visuals would make you look, and that is perhaps the real point and marketing goal. The much crisper supporting LCD off to the right reinforces things pretty nicely, and could be used for call to action text and prices/promotions.

Theoretically, the pitch could be tighter on these transparent films, but as you pack more LED chips in, you begin to lose the transparency, and, therefore, the point.

This is likely something that needs to be seen in person to be assessed and appreciated. But that ain’t happening. If I got in a car and started driving, I’d be at Pacific Centre in 57 hours, more if I stopped and slept, or if there is traffic.

In the absence of that, here’s a video: