A Shenzhen company called Nexnovo sent me pix, tech details and a video about a transparent LED mesh wall on the corner of a building in Tokyo, and I am scratching my head wondering why the job was done like this.
The building owner, or someone, had custom versions of the mesh cut so they would fit the exact dimensions of the windows, leaving wide vertical and horizontal sections of the building’s cladding empty.
The visuals that run at night, as you can see in the video, look pretty sharp and bright. But it also looks like a circa 2005 video wall with extra wide bezels. The gaps between the LED segments are wide, so the “full screen” visuals look awful.
Very odd. The only reason why they’d do that, as far as I can figure out, is that mounting them inside in the windows was a lot cheaper. There are lots of instances out there of whole building facades being draped in one solid LED mesh screen, but that’s going to cost more and MAYBE need local zoning approvals.
Dave Haynes is the founder and editor of Sixteen:Nine, an online publication that has followed the digital signage industry for some 14 years. Dave does strategic advisory consulting work for many end-users and vendors, and also writes for many of them. He’s based near Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Canada’s east coast.
