ALIVE

Martin Professional´s headquarter building in Aarhus, Denmark, has taken on a life of its own thanks to a media facade created by Kollision. A 180m2 facade of Martin Professional's LED screen technology, mounted on the internal front of the building, presents a wide variety of dynamic, graphical content that reacts to visitor interaction in the form of activities and movement in and outside the building. This unique interplay between building and visitor is a powerful form of branding that Kollision has termed Enhanced Brand Ambience, a communicative strategy that innovative companies can use to great effect.

The Martin Headquarters media facade features four reactive and interactive designs. Reactive Shadows: In a visualization of a passing sun, high contrast shadows from the building itself are cast onto the screen together with dynamic leaves, snowflakes and growing plants that react via sensors to passing vehicles and visitors entering the building. Dynamic Text: Via a dedicated app for iPad, visitors can combine predefined words into a short sentence and send it to the screen where it appears as particles of light. The particles float across the screen and slowly gather into words that display the visitor´s message. Mosaic: In a photo booth setup at the main entrance of the headquarter building, visitors can have their picture taken and automatically displayed in a large-scale dynamic mosaic on screen. The human mosaic is a new kind of urban social media that can be used as a digital guestbook showing faces and expressions from the most recent visitors. And finally, Distortion: Large geometric patterns that create the illusion of the building itself change shape and surface as visitors approach the screen.

In dialogue with Martin Professional Kollision developed and implemented the light designs, the real-time engine and the interactive and reactive principles of the media facade.