LG Now Marketing The Kinetic LED Wall Product It Used As Booth Eye Candy At Big Trade Shows This Year

September 24, 2024 by Dave Haynes

The previous post on here goes into Panasonic’s water vapor projection system, and in looking to make a point about trade show eye candy that never gets commercialized, I was going to use LG’s stands at ISE and InfoComm as Exhibit A – because of the Korean electronics giant fronting its mega-stands with a shape-shifting kinetic LED video tower.

I assumed this was for the shows and not something it would actually sell, but I was wrong. LG Business Solutions has a dedicated page and product PDF for what it calls LG Kinetic LED Media Art. LG appears to be re-marketing product developed by a much smaller company called Easy With, which has a bunch of kinetic thingies, not all involving LEDs.

If you were not at either one of those trade shows and wondering what I am going on about, kinetic LED walls are LED displays that have individual LED display cabinets on robotic sliders, like drawers that open and close. The idea is that software can sync up these units to create visually interesting movements and draw the attention of people.

The most famous of these was the spectacularly ill-conceived outdoor billboard bankrolled by Coca-Cola for its high profile display in New York’s Times Square. People with operations experience generally had one look at the videos of the thing and said it would end badly, because moving parts in a big city that gets four seasons of weather will not last. And they didn’t.

It’s very different indoors, because climate is controlled and airborne grime is far less of an issue. But the moving parts thing is still an issue, particularly when dozens or 100s of the things have to all fully close, and not “almost” close, for the thing to look good.

This is what the things look like:

I think these things can have a role in the experiential design of some built spaces, but the owners and designers really-really-really need to think through the creative to deliver something really uses the shape-shifting. One of the knocks on the Coca-Cola signs, reliability aside, was how much of what was done on the big board could be done as visual illusions in the creative.