Wondering if anyone else has seen this awesome Apple Store LED window display...

Archive FastLED Archive
1

Wondering if anyone else has seen this awesome Apple Store LED window display… Is it rolled out across all stores or did we just get lucky in Seattle?

There were six of these in my store (2 groups of 3) and each one is a box surrounding an ipad running a demo video. I didn’t capture the full cycle of animations in my video, but it does way more than just radiating lines. At times it does patterns that could only come from full video or at least a very complex animation loop (not just ‘plasma’.) The colors and patterns change in sync with whatever is on the screen of the ipad inside the box.

Its subtle design and construction hide some powerful tech. Very Apple! They’re using a 40x80 [counted, not 32x] panel on each wall of the box. A mirror on the back of the box makes them look like cubes with 80x80 LED walls, although the mirror effect is obvious, as you can see. The walls are thin and the LEDs run right up to the front edge - no “bezel” or any room for a bulky power supply. I suppose that’s probably behind the mirror at the back of the box.

Sorry, the video from my phone to youtube seems to have gotten pretty compressed, hopefully it gives a sense of what’s going on.

Anyway, at 40x80x4 LEDs per box I am wondering what kind of panels these must be? They’re doing smooth animation of ~13k LEDs! Pushing a lot of data, and no doubt drawing a lot of power…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0OJ_BOExsQ

2

Now that I’ve read up on how the SmartMatrix / panel work on scanlines, I can see how the power consumption’s probably more reasonable than I imagined :slight_smile:

3

768 Amps, 3850 Watts… Holy Hell! :slight_smile:

4

Apa102’s can easily drive 13,000 LEDs at ~30fps even before you do any kind of parallelization games.

5

I’ve seen it in a store in the Vancouver area.

6

Spotted it in Perth Australia the other day, but didn’t pay attention to it as I reckoned it was just more Apple showboating :slight_smile:

7

My question is “Was the iPad running the show?”

8

IME all the apple stores have different, but impressive, LED art. The one in SF I go by, has a big 2d hanging. IIRC the LEDs are on bare (or nearly bare wire) very little support structure, and very open/airy/transparent.

9

Herb - I think it’s more likely that the LED art was just synced to the video. But I’d love to find out! For me, the big question was “are they using FastLED?” although I suppose a parallel library like Octo might be more likely. 2nd question(s) being: what kind of LED matrix is that and how are they keeping power usage down?