LED Wall’s Generative Artwork Responds To Customers At H&M London Flagship

February 17, 2023 by Dave Haynes

The fashion retail brand H&M’s Regent Street flagship is using generative artwork on a giant LED wall that fills the full rear wall of the store on one of London’s fancier shopping streets.

“Digital experience designers” Hirsch & Mann collaborated with the creative coding studio Variable to create a constantly evolving, generative artwork that interacts with customers as they travel on the escalators between the ground and first floors. The artwork refreshes and changes in line with seasonal campaigns, collections and the time of day.

The video wall is touted as being one of the largest in European retail. It’s a 2.5mm Leyard with a resolution of 4,200 pixels wide by 3,536 pixels high.

The custom CMS allows for various ‘modes’ to be showcased on the LED canvas depending on the days – starting with single-coloured glossy canvases during the earlier part of the day, to a combination of more vibrant and saturated colours in the evenings and on weekends.

“The artwork’s materials have been curated to have a highly gloss aesthetic, reflecting lighting and colours of digital environments within a physical space,” says Daniel Hirschmann, CEO at London-based Hirsch & Mann. “The screen uses customized algorithms to behave like a physical fabric when manipulated in real life, becoming more dynamic every time a customer uses the escalators to move between the ground and the first floor.”

“In that moment,” he adds, “a series of 3D depth cameras attached to the store’s ceiling track a person’s position on the escalators, enabling ripples and folds to appear on the material behind them, like a trail. This subtle reaction to people’s presence creates a fun moment of surprise and invites the customer to leave an ephemeral mark on the canvas and the fabric of the architecture.”