Kin were asked by
The One Off to help them realise their vision for the new Barclays Flagship in Piccadilly Circus. We co-created a number of interactive installations with them, which capture small moments of London life.
The main focal installation is a 24 screen bezel-less plasma wall – BeingLondon. A random swarm of different coloured spheres float above an illustrative animated map of London. We partnered with
TimeOut Magazine and interpreted each event listing from their RSS feed as a different sphere. We mixed in other spheres created by
twitter feeds from people blogging about the similar subject matter in different areas of London. The mass of spheres swarms and clusters to form words, then individual spheres randomly unpack to reveal their content while the ever-changing background map alters to reflect the time of day – getting brighter as the day goes on, and then darker and illuminated towards evening. The wall also looks for key words from the
BBC Weather RSS feed and activates background weather animations – rain drops if its raining outside and falling snowflakes if its snowing.
Picture galleries hang on the lower personal finance floor and the first floor Premier Lounge. Amongst beautiful cityscape photography of London, are portrait images of Barclay’s customers. As a visitor moves closer, so the images come to life and talk back at them, telling them how Barclays has helped them with their personal and business finances.
At night the bank has to compete with the iconic lights of Piccadilly above it. We wanted to create an interactive experience to capture the buzz of London night-life. From our early experiments with video imagery we have always been fascinated with the instinctive human attraction to our self image (see
R and D). A large back-projection screen comes down behind the glass of the front window. Two video cameras look out onto the street in front of the bank and their live video stream is relayed onto the screen. Passersby are instantly attracted to their own image projected onto the big screen. Using facial recognition software their faces are detected and a floating thought bubble hovers above their head. The bubble moves and tracks to their movements. Inside the thought bubble a random text message is displayed – "Haven’t I seen you before?", "Stop trying to put words in my head", "Didn’t this used to be a Burger King?".
If you'd like more information about this or any other kin project, email us at:
questions@kin-design.com
