“Operation Smile” public art display for Windows Live

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For the launch of Windows Live Wave 2 late last year, Microsoft together with the non-profit organization “Operation Smile” hosted an event in New York with a dazzling art installation featuring a 60-feet wide white sphere. On this sphere, they projected a dynamically-generated visualization of smiling faces with thousands of smaller pictures. The end result if nothing of a sheer visual spectacle. And because everything was rendered in real-time, attendees at the event could even upload their own face pictures into the pool of faces although I’m sure it’ll be one hell of a “Where’s Waldo” to find.

It was put together by creative studio “firstborn” using an open-source visual graphics platform called Processing. Check out their website for more gorgeous screenshots as well as a look at the behind the scenes wizardry.

This sure gives the Times Square NYE Ball a run for its money.

25 insightful thoughts

  1. Impressive. Processing is a really powerfull programming platform, even for designers. We are using it much here at my university.

  2. WoW! This is has more “WoW” factor than the Vista marketing…and the fact that they used Windows to manage this…puts Macs to shame.

  3. Cool. This should be Vista’s advertisement. At the end, it should say, The definition of WOW, Microsoft Windows Vista. @ Albert: I agree with your [email protected] quikboy: I do not know what it has to do with Windows or Live but I know Microsoft is participating in Operation smile.

    @Long: Great Find. Where did you find it. TELL ME NOW. It’s a matter of life or death.

    Visit my blog at electtechs.blogspot.com

  4. I could see some cool WMP virualizations from some of that animation (even if its only going to be 2d on your screen)

  5. If anyone has a Sony Ericsson with trackID, they could use that to figure out what song is playing.

  6. It’s “Modeselektor feat. Thom Yorke – White Flash”.

    MusicID’d on WM device.

    Great video btw, Long, and I concur that this video be used as the WOW campaign header.

  7. Hmmm…Sure you could download possessing…however Playing with the source for this project in processing would be great!

    People got pictures taken from booths all around the sphere…then the images were dynamically fed into the visualization live-WAY COOL!!

    And cheers GBC… I wanted that song a lot!

  8. @memberjoe: I think they are using XP because processing is kinda wacky on vista (at least for me)

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