Another Robotic LED DOOH Display Surfaces – Shape-Shifting In Seoul

July 26, 2023 by Dave Haynes

A vendor has passed along a link to a video showing its robotic LED DOOH billboard operating in Seoul, with the assertion that the unit has been mechanically shape-shifting without incident for more than a year.

The manufacturer PJ Link was responding to a recent Linkedin repost I did about a kinetic display being used for an indoor application, and my suggestion that an inside set-up is going to be much more reliable and durable than one out in the elements. I cited the very high-profile, short-lived Coca-Cola robotic LED display that went up in Times Square and stopped shape-shifting after only a few months – the technical problems quite evident in modules that weren’t sliding in and out as designed.

“Gotta say time is different now. Outdoor projects? Totally nailed it. Check our project in South Korea, 216 sqm led wall, delivered last April, been running day and night for a year now. Below is their channel, they update with screen content every week.”

The video below by the media owner first spends a lot of time providing context on the board’s location in Seoul – a high traffic area in a sprawling city that from my experience is high traffic everywhere. It shows the board installed and operating on the side of a commercial building (or maybe residential, hard to tell) in Seoul.

If it went up in April 2022, it’s been through a winter in Seoul – and that city does get snow. So it has shown it can run, and stay running, in outdoor conditions.

That’s great, but as noted when the Coca-Cola board went up several years ago, moving parts are things operations people like to avoid where possible … particularly moving parts that are out in the elements in a mega-city that can’t help but have a lot of airborne crud finding its way onto things, like robotic drawer sliders.

Also as noted, when the Coke board went up, lots of creative people pointed out the visuals executed by the shape-shifting display could be done just in the creative, through visual illusions. As we’ve seen in the last couple of years, there are now countless examples of anamorphic/forced perspective illusion pieces running on DOOH billboards all over the world. So you get the visual whiz-bangery, but not the  field service costs.

Maybe it’s just me, but the intro video below also shows a curvy “design plaza” building that is using I’m not sure what to animate its exterior at night, and I find that way more visually interesting than a rectangle on a building wall.