Giant Anamorphic Wave First Seen In Seoul Washes Into NYC’s Times Square
July 19, 2021 by Dave Haynes
The anamorphic illusions that have been popping more and more on LED boards in Asian megacities are now showing up in arguably the world capital of big displays – New York’s Times Square.
This is a wave-based illusion – dubbed The WHALE – that’s running on the board I call the LED Board That Ate Times Square – the vast one that fronts the Marriott Marquis. It is apparently also called Big Kahuna.
It was put together by the media firm Silvercast Media, using the Mitsubishi 10mm display that Diversified put in for the commercial property firm Vornado way back in 2014. The board runs off YCD’s software and, based on what I saw in the control room when the thing went live, Seneca servers and stacks of BrightSign boxes as failover.
As with most of these illusions – emphasize illusion, it’s not the display technology doing this – the visuals work best from a certain angle, which is why the short video below is shot from a corner angle and not head-on.
The video sequence is running every 30 minutes, for one minute, on the display, for the next week. A post about in on Facebook seems to confirm this is not original work, but licensed/borrowed/something from the Seoul creative shop d’strict, which has done numerous large format visuals like this on a big Samsung display in that city, and elsewhere.
Interesting and unfortunate that I can’t see anyone in the crowd looking at it. Surely the point of this type of media is to get the wow effect – it should be dragging in eyeballs, and I wonder why it isn’t?